So there's that... but the correlation I intended to draw was much different than this weak meme. It is clear that Occupy Wall Street has legs, and it obviously has sleeping bags - and those sleeping bags have paid off. What was initially written off and subject to a widespread media blackout, has lasted long enough to be taken Not Seriously by various pundits, then written off as un-American, and now, finally, been given credence.
How the idiot pundits could not get it, I kind of understand. It's like this - those wretched talking head types are so used to The Game, and how ideas are bundled, packaged and gift wrapped into little dumbed-down, bite-sized morsels for mass distribution and consumption, that when a Genuine, Earnest idea makes a splash, they scramble for the Real Meaning, assuming that any political notion is just a sweet candy shell surrounding a bitter, nasty husk of some back-room truth. They can't cope with the possibility that an idea could be, on the face of it, the very idea that it's supposed to represent. Their circuits become scrambled, and there's a waft of blue smoke as the motherboard begins to fry. But, you know, these are our trusted news sources.
So yes, these young people are gathering to be collectively Anti-American, Anti-Capitalism Commies who's main intent is to be a slacker burden on society. OR, they are of the generation who grew up through the Dot Com bubble and a few huge economic dips, and feel disenfranchised by the pervasive notion that a stark few control most of the wealth, while people are losing their homes because the very few rich, when left to their own devices, just couldn't help themselves, and had to defraud and raid the retirement of the middle class. All while shareholders have just enough control of the major employers in the US to ensure that any job worth working gets exported to China in the ever-quest for rising stock values. Like that poor horse in True Grit, American Industry will be ridden until it falls exhausted, only to be shot in the head by Rooster Cogburn, or, in this case, those Super-Wealthy 400 families who, I suppose, will need all that money so they can live on the Moon.
All this while Politicians are doing a very short-sighted version of The Dirty to fill their pockets on what's left of the American Dream, selling off any local government property and revenue that isn't bolted down, so to speak.
Take these raw facts, push them through the Play Doh Spaghetti Factory of Michael Moore and Matt Taibbi and a few other choice voices, you get these little focused pills of rage that the youth eats up like hot cakes. They get mad, they all instinctually know that the system is fucked up, and they organize - much like their Grandparents did in the Sixties.
And the pundits don't get it. "What does it all mean?" they ask from behind their cheap Formica and pancake makeup. It's like Sesame Street. Sometimes a huge yellow bird reciting the alphabet is just a huge yellow bird reciting the alphabet.
