Guerilla Warfare at Occupy Wall Street

There is a nine hundred pound gorilla in the room - but what is it? What does it want? These are simple questions, which, nowadays demand simple answers, but none are offered, and this is extremely upsetting to those in the 24 hour news cycle. They want to touch, hold and examine a moment then label and file it - but all they have is a movement that is not only taking place physically in cities around the country, but going on in peoples imaginations around the country.

So, like any other nine hundred pound gorilla, Occupy Wall Street was ignored, more or less, by the media - nobody wants to talk about it, as the old saying goes. But after a few weeks it was clear that this gorilla wasn't leaving and it was only getting bigger, so the media, having nothing better to go on than opinion and assumption, decided to put a hat on it, calling it some crude  Pro/Anti Left/Right Up/Down Green/Gray Rich/Poor Liberal/Conservative agenda machine. It was glorious - they could write if off as whatever they wanted it to be, waiting for it to lose steam, waiting to get in the last word.

But still the gorilla stays - more than a month later. And it's getting bigger. And it has no leadership, no demands. Now, after all that struggle, there's an increasingly large group of people who are fed up with the financial system and the state of jobs, who are soothing their angst with their numbers and with the power and momentum their cause. And because it has no figurehead or specific demands, it is finally settling in the public mind that it can be whatever they want it to be, too. With merely the power of presence, OWS can be the voice of an entire disillusioned nation who has watched the American Dream suffer the death of a thousand cuts, as the Dastardly Few worked tirelessly to sell the bones out of it, leaving a withered, deranged husk. We are a Gorilla Nation.

Occupy Sesame Street

What started as an idea that I had in the shower today, actually turned out to be a thing already. From the internet, Occupy Sesame Street:

 

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.