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Chris Roach writes:
My initially measured view of the Occupy Wall Street crowd has given way to real concern about their nastiness and capacity for violence. Dozens have been arrested all of the country. The moderates have departed and are replaced by bored, angry young people. They have attacked police, broken laws, hurled missiles, and all the rest. [Emphasis added.]
But then he appears to miss the point:
[A] great many of the Zucotti Park protesters and their fellow travelers are manifesting that love of destruction and hostility to law that characterized the protest movements of the 1960s . . . . I think it a terrible political judgment by Obama to align himself with this unpredictable group of unemployed (and unemployable) losers.
Without making any judgment about the cause or character of either the 1960s or OWS. I rather agree with Steve that the original OWS protestors are in danger of being ethnically cleansed from their own protest by minorities and vagrants. Good White Liberals have no intellectual or moral antibodies that help them exclude from their midst any Designated Victim Group.
OWS has the feel of a movement that would just as soon dispense the bourgeois instruments of social control, yet they are finding that, in multicultural America, that’s a sure formula for their own extinction. But I wonder: if we were, I dunno, Iceland, how long would we last without those instruments?
3 comments:
I went looking for them today in DC but failed. All I found were the normal types of freeloaders, moochers and ne'er-do-wells.
I've noted a shift in the media coverage of OWS and affiliated sit-ins across the country. We see far fewer fawning human-interest stories about OWS; concurrently, I also do not hear nearly as many comparisons with the Tea Partiers. Now what we're seeing is clashes with police, sanitation issues, and rape/assault allegations. Also gone is the high(er)-minded rhetoric against banksters and crony corporatism, it has been replaced by something a bit more malevolent.
The weird part (for me anyways) is the potential nexus between OWS and Tea Partiers...the distaste for crony corporatism. Whodathunkit that a huge red-stater like moi would have anything in common with tin foil hat wearing neo-hippies?
I went looking for them today in DC but failed. All I found were the normal types of freeloaders, moochers and ne'er-do-wells.
So . . . how do you know you failed?
EW: There is a tendency among many of us (and I include myself in this category) to attribute to the OWS (or the TEA Party for that matter) our own socio-economic critique. Some of these attributions have more merit than others, but really, the only consistent theme of OWS is that the white-collar jobs to which the protestors thought they were buying access with their massive student loans has failed to materialize. That's a real grievance, but it's not a platform. Other than that, the OWS output looks a lot like the standard Left-wing litany, and more hair of the same dog.
Which is to say, I would want to see specific evidence that corporate cronyism is much on their agenda.
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