I am not, in the normal course of things, a “shoe-leather journalist.” Nothing against covering a story on the ground, mind you, but I’ve been there and done that (starting more than 30 years ago), and while political commentary may not pay as well or garner as much respect as on-the-scene, five-point-lede, just-the-facts-ma’am reportage, it puts less wear and tear on the ol’ carcass.
Nonetheless, I’m loath to comment on a mass movement without actually getting out to take its temperature, live and in 3D. So I schlepped said carcass, complete with Guy Fawkes mask and “Smash the State/No War But Class War” sign down to Kiener Plaza to have a look at Occupy St. Louis on Friday evening.
First descriptive pass: A few hundred people — a full order of magnitude fewer than I saw in the same place two years ago at the early Tea Party rallies — with an ideological center of gravity somewhere in the neighborhood of “mild reform Democrat.”
Not to sneer at conventional liberals (I really believe that they really believe, bless their hearts), or to minimize the movement’s diversity. There were all kinds of people assembled at Kiener, ranging out to Ron Paul “End the Fed” types and even real anarchists.
But, while everyone I met seems sincere in their desire for Change [TM], and everyone seems to really, really want to see America coming together in a mass movement for that Change [TM], the most coherent versions of the Occupy movement’s goals are minor tweaks at best, and at worst more of the same old wrong-headed stuff with a thin coat of populist whitewash: Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. Overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United. Generic “get the corporations under control” fluff.
I heard one guy say “you know something big is up when you see librarians marching” (I saw no visible organized librarian presence, but what the hey …)
Maybe he’s right, but I think it’s at least as likely that you know something is safely under control and already buttoning down into just another co-opted partisan astroturf noise machine when you see librarians marching and detect not so much as a whiff of tear gas.
If you’ve ever been to an effective demonstration, you know the feeling. It may not be full-blown revolutionary consciousness, but there’s something crackling in the air, a current flowing through the crowd and throwing nearly visible sparks into the atmosphere.
When the crowd chants “What do we want? [Insert goal here] When do we want it? Now!” you know that they will walk in front of the tanks, if the tanks come. When the crowd takes an intersection and the police order it cleared, the crowd faces the police line and silently, collectively says “come and clear it … if you’ve got the stones.”
Usually that high-voltage unity burns itself out when the tanks don’t come or the police line doesn’t charge, or when it does go down and metal trumps meat. But it was there, and everyone knows it was there, and maybe next time …
Maybe the Occupy movement has that kind of mojo going for it elsewhere, but I just didn’t feel it in St. Louis. And I have to think that the problem is the goals. We’re way beyond the point where a little tinkering will resolve anything, or sustain the energy necessary for resolving anything.
People: The President of the United States has now openly exercised the power to murder at will, without charge, without process, without trial, on the word of a secret death panel which declines to reveal its criteria or even its composition. In front of our very eyes, he’s become Peter Boyle’s Nixon character in Where the Buffalo Roam: “I’m the President of the United States, and I can do anything I want.” And virtually every American politician of note has endorsed that transfiguration!
The political class has always been at war with the productive class, but here in America that war has now been openly declared and then some … and make no mistake, the corporations are our enemy’s quartermasters. Adding a few lines to the list of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s powers isn’t just not enough, it’s a terrible joke at an unfunny moment.
Any goal short of “perish the state” (and with it its symbiotes, the corporations) is, at this point, a suicide wish.
Citations to this article:
- Thomas L. Knapp, Pre-Occupied in St. Louis, St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph, 10/13/11
- Thomas L. Knapp, Pre-Occupied in St. Louis, South Coast Today, 10/11/11
If you would have been there for the March you woul
d feel differently.
Maybe so … but I don't know.
I've been on plenty of marches, and one that culminates in cheers for the mayor's letter saying "'Occupy,' my ass — squawk all you want as long as you're out of the park by 10" strikes me as kind of pointless.
I'm copying over my comment from Knappster's slightly abbreviated version of Tom's commentary on OccupyStLouis for (hopefully) wider reading.
Since I and Paul are in rural Ontario until month's end (as we are each May thru October), we haven't had the opportunity to view any protests or even hear of them on local radio. (With a web search I see though that some activity is planned for this weekend for the Phoenix and Flagstaff AZ areas. (As you recall my legal residence is in central Arizona, where we are located Nov thru April).
I've made the point many times at various blog/article comments and at Twitter that the #OccupyWallStreet protesters are focusing on the wrong target, since it is government that is the root problem. While moneyed
friends of government elected/appointed officials may put plenty of bucks into campaigns and actual pockets (or via expensive trinkets and junkets), they wouldn't be able to received any privileges were it not for the gov guys themselves. But even deeper is the fact – which I again make clear – that without the enforcers, government couldn't even get/take the money from the populace which they spend on all sorts of programs, WAR, and interest on debt for more programs and wars. These enforcers, individuals willing to threaten and even initiate physical force, are key to everything government does since none of the legislators, executives (Pres included), judges & bureaucrats dirty their hands with enforcement of all those regulations/laws/directives/mandates/etc.
With far fewer enforcers, government could do far less harm at home and abroad; and far fewer individuals would want such a job if it was VERY unpopular among most of the very much larger number of non-enforcers… so unpopular that continuing enforcers received no voluntary association of any kind – no sales, no service, no camaraderie, no anything (including no violence) – from the vast majority of people they encountered.
But then I'm just one very small electronic voice among billions of messages sent out into the ether – how many actually read those points is likely very small. And then there is the occasional replier who says, "It'll never work." I wonder to myself if such a person is part of the problem – someone who is buddies (or even just friendly neighbors) with one or more government enforcing agent… Tolerance of the enablers of the root problem is the major obstacle as I see it. Of course, failure to recognize government as the root problem is a situation of blindness – often self-induced even while it is always self-perpetuated. And one only stumbles around in the dark, which in this case can be lessened and eventually eliminated with reasoned thought (and some good foundational readings).
Will the protesters at various Occupy events get the message that government is at the root of all the problems for which they are out in the streets?
Continuing highly destructive wars abroad, continuing harm-causing wars" againstX (mainly "drugs" now) at home, a lagging economy with fewer jobs available, ever-increasing prices for most everything, banksters rolling in bailout money, required searches/scans/gropes before air (and sometimes other forms of) travel & entering many locations, stops and even arrests for photographing/videoing various public places or people (mostly cops) in public, taxpayer funded education system that mostly produces test takers for high score games not knowledgeable skilled individuals with value to trade), taxpayer funded medical care in the wings supposedly to solve the problems originating from highly government regulated medical services, largest % prison population in the world, …. the list would cover pages…
I really do not know how many protesters will come to understand…. only time will tell.
Not directly related but interesting was the record low voter turn-out for Ontario's provincial election this past Thursday – just under 50%! While some (who had voted) commenters at a news article on a Canadian news website were angry about the abstainers, one at least wrote that she had purposely spoiled her ballot in protest at the fact that there was no "None of the Above" choice for her; she was disgusted with all politicians. That's a start at lease towards understanding that the entire system is deserving of disgust. I suspect that a fair number of the slightly more than 50% of eligible Ontario voters think this way. I know of at least one
It does have that mojo – in NYC, where the serious symbolic fight is going down. IMHO, the primary function of the other occupations is to funnel resources, people, and support to that battle. As such, you indeed lack the same sense of criticality, because St. Louis is not where the fight will be won or lost: Wall Street is.
Sounds like pablum for old folks to me. How can you be so sincere and so wrong!
Military occupation is effective provisional control of a certain power over a territory which is not under the formal sovereignty of that entity, without the volition of the actual sovereign.
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