Sunday, November 13, 2011

how I stopped worrying and learned to love the OWS protests


Rolling Stone | I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.

That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."

The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.

What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.

We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.

If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.

19 comments:

Ed Dunn said...

This article explains exactly what I've been trying to say all along, a bunch of rag-tag hippies who just have emotional thoughts and enjoying the company of rich rappers instead of a real calculated strategy to get something done.  Chaos and anarchy is just as much as a strategy and tactic as organized agents and strategic data manipulation.

This Rolling Stone diatribe again demonstrates that the rich, Wall Streets and the financial institutions is no where near impacted after several weeks of this OWS campaign. In fact, and this is the part that I cannot figure out for the life of me is why the first target was not the mainstream media who is providing the filter for the rich and the political structure.

Isn't the New York Times the same newspaper that Cheney was leaking information to for that one female journalist to write stories about Iraq stockpiling weapons of mass destruction? And the New York Times refused to cover any parts of the OWS movement in depth to help understand their argument. But we have not seen not one iota of a structured campaign against the NYT or any other media that is suppressing news about this movement.

Any rules of engagement is to first take down communication and not one of OWS went after the mainstream media filter that protects the rich. And we still want to believe this OWS will actually go somewhere after all these months? Everything from winter approaching, chaos in the camps and slow strategy defies all that was written in the Art of War...

nanakwame said...

To give voice to your feelings, you must
necessarily let them go - ZenYet on the left comes this also known well in our Latin Americas, not that ethic not be a social barometer, and keep madmen locked in the woods; but it has been proven one can not dictate it, in a world that is impermanent in the first place.  With the past and the future, here. We sure play it out...

The Sisters of St. Francis
are hardly the only religious voices challenging big business. They have teamed
up on shareholder resolutions with other orders, including the Sisters of
Charity of St. Elizabeth and the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell,
both in New Jersey.
The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, the
umbrella group under which much of Sister Nora’s activism takes place, includes
Jews, Quakers, Presbyterians and nearly 300 faith-based investing groups. The Vatican, too,
has weighed in with a recent encyclical, condemning “the idolatry of the
market” and calling for the establishment of a central authority that could
stave off future financial crises.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/business/sisters-of-st-francis-the-quiet-shareholder-activists.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

brotherbrown said...

Is that what you got from that article?  Such a small box your mind is restricted to.

Tom said...

Well that's the same attitude a lot of my co-pigmented leftists&#0153 are taking, criticize the movement for what it lacks and remain in our armchairs.

CNu said...

lol, meanwhile the movement - like yeast in a big barrel of moistened flour - continues doing what it do in meatspace and digital spaces without any regard for sour grapes of uninvolved poo-pooers and nay-sayers...,

my respect for those who do what they do without regard for the opinions of others has increased profoundly over the past couple of years, due in largest measure to the fact that that's PRECISELY the approach I've taken with my own project work.

enduring the passage of time and digging in for the winter - OWS becomes increasingly powerful and self-sufficient - everything else is merely conversation....,

Ed Dunn said...

I'm under the impression OWS is trying to be made out to something it is not. It is not a collective superstructure that will organically evolve into this movement against the "too big to fail" institutions out there.  There is absolute no evidence of that.

No one is asking about these cities that are already cash-strapped spending money to pay union cops overtime, hurting their budget for next year and making things even worse.

No one is mentioning anything about the global economic landscape as if these American hippies beating on congo drums and admiring rich rappers is going to be cheaper, faster and smarter than their counterparts in emerging economies.

But we are  fantasizing that some rich guy in Davos is just going to have a thaw in his cold heart and start offering refinancing to low interest rates, cubicle-based jobs and start paying more taxes because of social disruption is occurring in a place they don't even interact with.
 

CNu said...

I'm under the impression

noted.

these cities that are already cash-strapped spending money to pay union cops

broke cities need to stop trying to flex on non-violent protesters exercising their 1st amendment rights. period.

But we are  fantasizing

what you mean "we" kimosabe?

I'm pleased as punch that OWS is doing what it's doing and I support the rorschachian suchness of what they're doing

DD said...

While the alchemists, of both the king and the opposition, argued about the true method for transmutation of gold, and the proper method for acquiring the philosopher's stone, the peasants realized that they had never actually possessed any gold anyway, and it held no practical value for them to worry about how to make more for the sovereign in the face of oncoming winter.

Can I get a repost of that Hakim Bey, fairytale of money post from a few years back. That's what I'm talking about.

Ed Dunn said...

You are correct about the "we", I should have said "yall are fantasizing"...

 Still, no commentary on how global competitiveness is being ignored like an 800lb gorilla in the room.

 

Ed Dunn said...

DD,

The issue I have is that we keep acting like the "peasants" matter when these people jobs already been outsourced, their mortgages has already been transformed into exotic derivatives  and global companies are going where the tax rate is more favorable. The argument keep making the assumption that only the USA is in play and these people who are saying "f*ck this sh*t" do not have global counterparts.

Ed Dunn said...

Brotherbrown, when your responses tries to attack or analyze an individual ("small box..mind" comment)  instead of being able to rationalize the subject at hand, it is a clear sign of your limited ability to engage in certain subject matters.  

I do not see the difference between your rationale than that of a "I am John Galt/Don't Tread on Me/I Want My Country Back" Tea Party advocate who focus on emotional rhetoric instead of any semblance of logic.

You want to go to a troll/flame war, go right ahead, but just keep in mine you haven't explain not one thing other than try to think I'm suppose to respect your persona/ego on this subject matter and ignore the subject itself.

CNu said...

lol, methinkst thou protests too loudly Ed.

Your 800lb gorilla (zero-sum competitive capitalist hustle) has peaked and is now in sharp and potentially irreversible decline.

No one in power (finance/government) is proposing solution(s) for the massive demographic surge in surplus labor, yet we all know full-well who harvested the surplus labor value. That the formerly silent and invisible majority (99%) is making itself visible and heard is more than enough for the time being. That it affords you no specific narrative thread to seize and no specific narrator's throat to choke is far more frustrating for you brah (as evidenced by your protestations on this thread alone)  than it is for any of us contented with the fact of movement for movement's sake on this front.

nanakwame said...

Peasants - these aren't peasants (they had no voice), and yes just like the right, wakes up the bottom, so does the left. AT core there is little differences, ALL  in the developed world, that parents, including yours, probably, taught - the world is yours, you can be anything you wish to be. Now loaded with debt and  factored into the reality, of a slow technocratic economy growth which btw was covered up the the great showman Ronnie and has been ever since to 2007, from about 1978 app...
Well Italy took its brazen clown out of office to show some serious resolve as Doc would do and placed a "Gray Technocrat who shuns media and social events".

You know Ed, what I find sad, that lack of literacy among your age group. The sandal at Penn State is a spinning off: denial and blatant huckstering,  covering  of our malaise. Those in the past future have gems to write about. What folks don't get these are stuff fascist allowed to stay in power. Where we under friendly fascism? 

nanakwame said...

are we under friendly fascism? my bag

brotherbrown said...

No, a flame-war is never my interest.  You have made it very clear that you don't understand what is going on, and any new explanation hasn't made a dent.  That's the definition of thinking in a box.  So let me tell you what my issues are that tend to make me support the Occupy Movement:

1. Bank fees and charges that trap consumers who are following the rules.  If I can make an electronic payment today and one finance company can accept the charge today, all of them can.  But some institute a program say says they won't accept it for 2 days, which can, and ofte does, generate a late fee.
Ed Dunn 
2. My daughter, 29, works two jobs, but does not have benefits in either one.  Because she is over 26 and is no longer a full-time student, she can't be on my wif'e's or my insurance.  While she was in college (out0of-state_ and still covered, we nevertheless had less of a hassle sending her a plane ticket home to see a doctor than to have her visit one on the assumption that we could expect reimbursement from our insurance plan.

Yet Banks and Insurance companies pay multi-mega-bucks to lobbyist to ensure they can continue to treat their consumers any kind of way.  I am the 99%.

brotherbrown said...

Does this mean you accept that the standard of living in the US must fall as the standard of living in emerging countries rise?  Are you okay with that?

nanakwame said...

http://news.yahoo.com/frank-miller-doesnt-think-much-occupy-wall-street-194424503.html

Ed Dunn said...

Thanks for that link nanakwame...

"Occupy” is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy"

That is the core issue I have with this nonsense...anarchy is an art and a science in itself. I know what an anarchist is and these people are no anarchist...

DD said...

Ed, the Occupiers just realize that YOU CAN"T TURN LEAD INTO GOLD and discussing the proper method to do so is a waste of time. Why you working so hard to get one of those alchemy gigs anyway?  The position isn't available to an unconnected scrub, and even if you get it, you're the offered sacrifice when your incantations fail to produce the desired results. Or do you have the true philosopher's stone if only one of God's descendants would grant you favor? Would the blessings of Kings validate your formulae?

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