<n><b>Attn: language prudes</b>. There is a lot of swearing for emphasis and for style. Especially what I will only in this warning refer to as the F-word.<fn> Read no further if you're too sensitive to stand it without writing me an email about what a shame it is that even otherwise eloquent people can no longer communicate without cursing. I submit that this implies a lack on your part in understanding that cursing is an essential part of eloquence and that anyone attempting to write while explicitly avoiding the explicit dooms themselves to a level of expressiveness that can only be described as prosaic and mediocre.</n> <hr> The "Occupy Wall Street" (OWS) protests are entering their fourth week and the people that matter have turned from ignoring the protest, hoping it will go away, to proclaiming that it's useless. Considering the economy and hundreds of other factors all related to just how oligarchic and corrupt the U.S. has gotten, it's a testament to the ubiquity of the belief in their own propaganda that they tried this tack at all. Whatever else you can say about OWS, saying that there is no reason to protest is just <i>wrong</i>. There's been a reason for this protest for the last 30 <i>years</i>. Since <i>at least</i> Reagan, and arguably before. The only hiccup in their non-coverage in the first weeks was, predictably, when violence broke out. It was NYC cop violence, which is hardly news, but it was violence nonetheless. The violence and slanted coverage both backfired and OWS gained traction. Local unions threw their hats in the ring; copycat protests started in other cities. Senators, congressmen, people of intellectual import but no power and so on, also expressed their support for the idea. So disparaging it entirely and ignoring it were no longer options. It was time to disparage it in a multi-pronged attack instead. So the media lackeys of power came up with some complaints about this protest and started hammering those into American brains via the dense propaganda network of radio and television. The problems with OWS are, roughly: <ul> Their message isn't coherent Their message isn't unified There are too many messages There is no clear leadership There are no real solutions proffered The target is too vague There are too many lefty tropes involved They don't offer many---or any---solutions None of the proposed solutions are perfect Some of the proposed solutions are worse </ul> Many of the complaints about the protests come from the vast majority of the current elite that have trained themselves to think that the current shape of society is the end of a long evolution. These are the "end-of-history" folk, too happy to kowtow to power. Perhaps we could call them Fukuyamas. They believe that the specialized form of what we have chosen to label as capitalism that we have now represents the pinnacle of human societal development. This is a natural thing to think of a system by which one has done well, especially if morality doesn't enter into it (as it oh-so-rarely does). The end of history is for the terminally myopic---and for those who have, by hook, by crook or by luck, ended up on top of the pile. They have discovered that the best way to defend their position is to convince everyone under them that this is the best of all possible worlds for them too. Yertle did the same. So the media starts telling all the potential supporters of OWS---and there are a lot of them out there---that it means nothing, a flash in the pan, there is no better world to be had, they are not being screwed, they are, in fact, living in the best nation to ever grace a planet anywhere and should be grateful to be allowed to take part. Never mind that they can't pay for health-care or commute 2 hours per day or have no savings and are underwater on their home. Never mind that the programs they need to survive are being cut from year to year. Never mind that schools are getting mind-bogglingly worse from year to year. Never mind that those with their foot on their necks are constantly telling them to get up and stop being so lazy. There are a lot of people with a legitimate reason to be frustrated and angry out there. There is a lot of wealth built by the incredible productivity of the U.S. and most people see almost none of it (the so-called 99%). Others, meanwhile, have such a tremendous amount of wealth that they see almost none of it as well---but it <i>belongs</i> to them---and no one else can use it, even if they don't need it or are even more than abstractly aware that they own it. The message of the protesters is quite clear: we are being royally fucked by the current system and we are taking the first step. This first step is that we are no longer going to believe the myth that we <i>aren't</i> being fucked. We will no longer partake unknowingly in our own subjugation (the subjugation of others is another matter). We may still take part for now, but we took the Red Pill and are working on getting out from under. The ways in which people get fucked by the current system are myriad; and thus the myriad messages we hear. This is what spontaneous frustration sounds like; the supposedly grass-roots populism of the Tea Party has a lot more money behind it and is therefore much more focused, but it's no more---or less---a real message for all that. The Tea Party has clear leaders because they are more organized; they also have real sponsors putting in real money. These sponsors aren't going to put up with a loose network of unanswerable go-betweens chanting to one another en masse because the cops forbade megaphones. Think about that for a second: people at OWS aren't allowed to use megaphones but Tea Party members were allowed to walk around on the Washington Mall <i>fully armed</i>. The people coming to OWS aren't organized---yet---because they just kind of showed up. Some of them disappear again because they get arrested or they get sick or whatever. It would make no sense to choose real leaders, given the level of attrition that the NYPD has so graciously engendered thus far. Leaders will naturally emerge but the aversion to selecting leaders who will be targeted by police is wholly understandable. At this point, the OWS message is just frustration and desperation and an inchoate expression of <i>unbelief</i> that America will---in any meaningful way---deliver to them the decent life they were promised. It is the explicit disavowal of the American myth of upward mobility, of American superiority and exceptionalism. They are no longer willing to accept all of the real-world detriments of living in America in exchange for being able to participate in the <i>greatest Democracy that has ever existed</i>. They may not know that they are doing this, but that is the core of the reason some people traveled so far to participate: they've got nothing else to do because the system failed them and they don't believe that they will, through any effort, be able to claw out an existence <i>unless the system changes</i>. The 99% followed all the advice, they followed all the rules, they asked no questions, they bought into the systems they were told to, they bought the things they were told to and here they sit, fucked as hell, in debt up to their eyeballs with no job prospects beyond jobs that eat 80% of their waking lives and provide only enough wherewithal to provide for 50% of the bare requirements their lives of quiet desperation have. It's not about getting a jet-ski; it's about not spending your waking hours worrying that your kids are going to go without food for a week because your car broke down. Again. Given these origins and the large number of people affected, it's not surprising that every lefty trope under the sun is being peddled to solve the problem. America is a land that taught its people that solutions are not only simple but that they can be applied unilaterally, so naturally this undereducated bunch---because undereducation is not limited to the right wing---thinks they can solve all of their problems by simply switching systems to anarcho-syndicalism or socialism or whatever else the kids are into these days. It won't be that simple, but that doesn't mean that they actually believe it to be. Maybe they <i>have</i> to believe it will be that easy or they wouldn't even bother to get out of bed each morning and they certainly wouldn't have bothered to protest. So, yeah, some solutions are going to be stupid and all are incomplete and some are worse. And a media that's being paid to make them look stupid isn't going to seek out the most coherent representatives, either. But that's not the point, is it? The protesters are there to expose the open wound of desperation and frustration. That's all. They don't have to be the ones who come up with solutions or even the ones who help solve the problems. They will be the ones who have to know whether they're willing to <i>try</i> the proposed solution to see if it works better for them than the previous one. They will choose and reject ideas based on their interpretation and understanding of the solutions and what the effects will be. In this, they will be steered by media and by others but they will hopefully be somewhat more wary about buying a pig in a poke this time around. "Get rid of bankers!" they cry. And those currently in charge take them literally at their word and shake their heads at those silly hippies and gently explain to them that the world would not work at all without banks. They are correct, but their condescension is nauseating. And their deliberate misinterpretation of a message they don't want to hear is pathetic. What OWS meant instead was: "Get rid of the CROOKED bankers!" ...or... "Change the banking system from the CORRUPT VAMPIRE that it is now to one that provides the benefits you mentioned in your condescending response without FUCKING US IN THE ASS!" ...or... "Society should be run for the benefit of the 99% instead of the benefit of the bankers!" ...or... "Stop telling us that corporations are legally designed to not care if we get fucked, to in fact try to fuck us if they can find a way to do it without significantly risking their profit or existence, as if there was no way to include corporations into society in any other way, as if the current laws of incorporation in the U.S. is some sort of universal constant like the atomic weight of Hydrogen". Not a lot of sound-bite quality there, really. Especially when the main problem is corruption. Corruption in political representation. Corruption in the corporate media. Companies that get so huge that they can <i>make laws</i> to legalize whatever they want to do. A system that is predisposed to end up this way. That's the problem. Capitalism as such is not the problem; it's the particular form of crony-capitalism that looks so much like oligarchy that's the problem. It's the massive disparity that's the problem. It's the attitude and basic philosophy underlying everything that's the problem. The system that provides Libertarianism to the poor and Socialism to the rich. So how's that for a rallying call? "Stop fucking up our lives based on the wishes and hopes of powerful people who are so ideologically damaged that they continuously fuck us in order not to have to either actually do their jobs or give up their simplistic ideas of how the world works, which is mostly based on how the people that pay them the most want the world to work (in which our ass-fucking is implied)." One of our unsung national treasures is Dean Baker, only one example of whose writings is <a href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/how-many-jobs-do-we-need-teaching-arithmetic-to-economists" source="" author="">How Many Jobs Do We Need: Teaching Arithmetic To Economists</a> in which he has to point out for the umpteenth time that a lot of our dear intellectual leaders are either stupid, lazy (phoning it in) or corrupt or some magical combination of all three. People like Dean Baker have almost no influence on policy whereas brilliant, corrupt asshole/idiots<fn> like Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke continue to run the entire U.S. economy no matter which party happens to currently be in charge. His ideological masters have not changed and neither has the center of power, which lies in neither party but rather somewhere else. The problem is complicated, which is why the OWS message will be so diverse and simultaneously muddled. It takes a lot of reading, a lot of brains and capacity for logical and abstract thinking and a lot of time to be able to even partially figure out how even some of the global/national economy/hegemony works. A lot of the people being fucked don't have any of the aforementioned things<fn>, but they <i>do</i> know that they're being fucked. They just can't say why, which doesn't in any way mean that they're any less fucked. The people being fucked are held to a higher standard than those doing the fucking (and their toadies in the media). The fuckees must be coherent and stay on message and come up with a plan and a solution that will work for everyone. And "work for everyone" means that the fucking continues but it hurts less. The other guys, on the other hand, as shown above by Mr. Baker, aren't held to the same standard at all. Hell, some of them are macroeconomists and economics journalists in positions of power and influence who don't even have to bother doing the basic math required to support their positions, either because they're too lazy or because they trust their gut ideology more than reality or because they've been paid to do so. OWS is a physical manifestation of a deep sickness that is immanent in the U.S.<fn> It's nothing new under the sun, though; all of the pseudo-philosophical rigmarole is just window-dressing for common corruption. The only reason we think it's special at all is because we've believed the myth for so long that we feel like the people fucking us must have been super-clever in order to get away with it for so long. Otherwise, how would we ever live with ourselves? If you're one of the fuckers instead of one of the fuckees---or if it doesn't hurt so much yet---take a Blue Pill and go back to sleep. <hr> <ft>It was particularly painful to watch an entire nation full of talking heads studiously avoiding the word "nigger" even though the family camp of a leading Republican national candidate (Rick Perry) was <i>named</i> "Niggerhead". The lack of understanding of the linguistic difference between "nigger" and, say, "cunt" is pathetic. In the first case, it is the epithet nigger itself that is considered offensive, not the subject to which is refers<fn>. In the second case, it is both the epithet and the subject to which it refers that is considered either offensive or taboo. If a journalist were to say cunt instead of vagina when referring to such, he would rightly be criticized for needlessly violating the taboo. However, the issue being reported in the Rick Perry/Niggerhead scandal is <i>exactly</i> that he used the word, so there should be no problem with using the word to report the issue. Naturally, the reporter should not appear to enjoy the opportunity to say the word nigger on national TV, but that shouldn't be too much trouble for a professional. <i>Not</i> saying the word changes the story from being about the GOP running a candidate who is casually racist enough to name his family's camp "niggerhead" to one about how scared a white person is to is to say nigger even when it is being used in a clinically descriptive way. It's like reporting on WWII by stating that dozens of millions of innocents were slaughtered, including over 6 million J-words.</ft> <ft>I'm entirely aware that Larry Summers is a big brain, but if he keeps putting that massive intellect to use to further his own power and wealth and that of his masters, I will feel free to call him an idiot because, as far as I'm concerned and, hopefully, as far as history is concerned, he's wasting his intellect. And that's not only stupid, it's immoral.</ft> <ft>Including your interlocutor, dear reader, who, though he is undoubtedly in the 99% is not personally suffering at all under the current system.</ft> <ft>Other countries in the first world are not far behind, but their people put the brakes on much earlier and aren't in so deeply yet. Their myths about their own greatness aren't believed as widely, as fervently or as universally or, if they are, the effects have been less severe (so far).</ft> <ft>I'm going to assume that we're all on the same page in stating that a black man is not per se offensive; otherwise, boy have you landed at the wrong blog.</ft>