Some days, you wake up and realize there is nothing you want for yourself; that getting up will do nothing more than prompt others to ask you to do stuff for them. Just staying in bed seems like a viable strategy. Or maybe that’s just me. Is that a sign of clinical depression?
No matter. Matt Taibbi’s latest analysis of the Occupy Wall Street movement appears to be that they’re doing the social protest equivalent of staying in bed. Just a bone-deep weariness of the culture in which we live.
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.
He concludes that, at some point, OWS will have to get specific and offer solutions to the problems but that, for now, it just needs to grow.
And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn’t need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.
He also revisits his thought that the OWS movement was aiming its frustrations in the wrong direction – why hassle the police when they’re just blue collar guys trying to do their jobs? (In the immortal words of Herman Cain, “you want a job, don’t you?”) But, Taibbi is willing to cut them at least a little slack by comparing the response and police resources expended on OWS as compared to those spent policing Wall Street itself. You get a much sterner response for protesting in the wrong spot than you do ripping off millions in the Wall Street casino.
But, the police thing is an aside. Weariness of the system and a desire to check out reminds me, once again, of Nenslo’s “Hateword” from years ago, one of the Rants of the Subgenius:
“They,” the Conspiracy, want you to buy all their crap, work hard all day at a mindless slave-task to pay for more machines to play their indoctrination programs on, to fill your home with pseudo-collectables in a limited numbered edition of a goddamn zillion. YOU KNOW ALL THAT!! We’ve told you and told you all that and if you don’t believe it by now there’s NO HOPE FOR YOU AT ALL and you might as well climb back over the fence and roll in the mud with the rest of the slavish porkers, right?? So you say to yourself, “Okay, I know what the Conspiracy wants from me, I know how they work, and what they do, and I’m NOT BUYING IT!! By gabbs, I’m gonna NOT do what they tell me to! I’m THROWIN’ AWAY MY TEEVEE, smashing my porcelain thimble collection, frisbeeing my CDs off lover’s leap and joining the radical anti-government party to learn how to make bombs!! I’m shaving my head and burning my house down and the more they tell me not to the more I’ll LAUGH in their faces and echo the noble sentiments of whoever it was that said FREE AT LAST FREE AT LAST THANK BLOB ALMIGHTY I’M FREE AT LAST!!” Right?
Sucker.
You think they didn’t plan for that? You think they’ll be surprised, huddling around their long mahogany table, appalled that one tenth of one percent of the population has “caught on” and won’t go up the slaughterhouse ramp like good little lambies?? Har dee har har. Listen, they know they can’t dupe everyone with the same turd-brain programming system. They know there are going to be a few who are just sharp enough to shake themselves awake and look around to see that the green pastures and still waters they were lying down by are actually a clanking conveyor belt carrying them relentlessly toward The Whirling Blades. They had that worked out a long time ago! They LOVE it when the ones who see the horror of the conspiracy program “go public” with their ghastly revelations or join radical anarchist communes or otherwise render themselves ENTIRELY UNBELIEVABLE!! Who do you think INVENTED hippies, punk rock, anarchism, youth gangs, “grafitti art,” rock and roll, hallucinogenic drugs, the New Age Movement, Christianity, cult films, alternative what-have-you?? Sure, it was some lone radical disillusioned soul at first, for about six months, but by the time WE heard about it, it was already a pre-packaged Official Conspiracy Product!!
For my part, I suspect Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing is just chugging along and our task is just to continue surfing the resulting waves as best we can.
Wilson46201 says
a Young Hegelian in Tippecanoe County?
Tipsy Teetotaler says
Well, I’ll be darned. This must be some sort of party line talking points shaping up. KunstlerCast this week (http://bit.ly/rIeCgA) speculated that the incoherence of OWS was a conscious strategy, because as soon as you get coherent, They will co-opt your message because They are so good at that.
Buzzcut says
America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable…
Man. Folks are so ungrateful. You provide them more choice and opportunities than anyone has had in the history of mankind, and this attitude is what you get back?
Kind of crazy.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: there is one and only one reason that OWS exists: a dearth of jobs that white people like.
That is actually a good thing. It is kind of ironic that many of these OWS folks are showing initiative and organizational skills. Now if only we can get them point in a productive direction (PERSONALLY productive, as in getting a job and making money for themselves).
Buzzcut says
OOPS! F’ed up the tags on that one, sorry.
Doug says
Fixed the tag.