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Occupy Wallstreet
I started out feeling skeptical about this movement,
and I think there's still work to be done
making sure it's as inclusive as it needs to be
among other things
but I've been watching it, and I've been going down there
and I have to say it is an inspiring scene,
and I think they are getting a lot of things right.
And when it comes to the core of it,
the goals and the messaging,
I think Occupy Wall Street is dead on.
I think it's every bit as specific as it needs to be.
And every bit as non-specific as it needs to be.
It's just specific enough to capture that basic sentiment so many people share,
and it's just vague enough to let many different people come to it
with many different shades of that sentiment.
And as it keeps growing and coalescing,
if certain people keep on professing not to get it,
those were probably the people who weren't supposed to get it.
And that is what I love most about Occupy Wall Street
As a media person who loves to watch how we communicate in that sphere,
I love Occupy Wall Street for how it manipulates all the news media's biggest corn balls
into outing themselves as corn balls.
I love watching them go on and on about how they have no idea what everyone's protesting.
I love watching them pretend it's just a bunch of hippies who don't matter
because they don't dress respectably.
I love how when it gets too big for that,
they start saying it doesn't matter because it's a bunch of yuppies who DO dress respectably.
I love when they say it's off-the-mark because the financial sector is mostly in midtown nowadays.
Like you really can't comprehend that this is about what Wall Street symbolizes.
I love when they say it's off the mark because we should be protesting Washington.
As if the symbolic Wall Street's undue influence on the symbolic Washington
hasn't been a running theme of this protest from the start.
I love this whole spectacle of everyone scrambling and scraping for ways to pretend that something
serious isn't happening here. It's like a big gameshow where everyone competes to see who
can build the biggest strawman. And it's not only fun to watch,
it provides a valuable service, because it reveals to us all who the Ringers are Wall Street's Three-card
Monte table.
Back in the 80s I bought all my vinyl at a place called The Music Factor
in Time Square. So I used to hang out on that block and study how the Three-card Monte games worked.
And as you probably know, every Three-card Monte setup has a Ringer. The Ringer's job is
to pretend they're an objective, outside observer commenting on the game,
when they're actually a part of the hustle who's there to help bamboozle
the public into thinking this game is legitimate. So naturally if we stand next
to the game and start telling everyone that the game is rigged, the Ringer is going
to flip on us and start doing everything they can to make sure nobody
listens to us. They're going to tell everyone that we're a bunch of losers who are just
hatin' because we don't know how to play the game. We're a bunch of
cardgame-hating socialists. They're going to try everything they can
to discredit us so they can protect that game that they're so invested in.
And it feels like that's what we've been seeing all month with Occupy Wall Street.
And you might be thinking to yourself my analogy is incomplete because
those card games also have a lookout, who's there to make sure the cops aren't
coming to shut the game down. And they usually have some muscle,
who's there to intimidate us from messing up the game.
And you'd be right, but that's how this version of the game is different.
In this version of the game, the hustler's don't need lookouts because the cops
don't want to shut down the game. In this version of the game, the cops are the muscle
to intimidate us from shutting down the game.
And that's not to say I think every police officer is a bad-guy, I suspect that many
rank-and-file officers are sympathic to this cause.
But the police, as an instititution, their function in this game has been to
step in and quiet us down whenever we shout, at the top of our lungs,
that we think this whole game is rigged.
So like I said at the beginning, I think there is a lot of work yet to be done,
and a lot of cards still left to fall just the right way for this to become everything that
it could be, but I do think it has incredibly potential. I think it's already
accomplishing big things. And if it doesn't accomplish anything else, I think Occupy
Wall Street has provided a vital service, simply by making it clear who the Ringers are,
and who the muscle is, at Wall Street and Washington's Three-card Monte
table. And I just hope the movement is sharp enough to survive this next stage of the game.
Where they realize they can't shut us down, so they start trying to co-opting us instead,
and make us a part of the game.