Politics: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests

From Rolling Stone courtesy of Hullabaloo, Matt Taibbi on Occupy Wall Street:

You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.

That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

And

And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.

But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country.

More here.

You know, I've speculated here on multiple occasions about why I ended up so liberal, especially when I started out as a Southern Baptist Republican. I'm sure that the reasons, in the end, are as varied and complex as my life itself is, but the one factor that always pops up when I think about such things is the time I spent in Austin, studying theater and the mass media, hanging out with artists, actors, writers, and musicians, and performing on stage, as both an actor and a singer-songwriter. In Austin, I came to understand and give a damn about culture.

And I don't simply mean highfalutin' culture. I mean, that's definitely a part of it, what with all the arts indoctrination classes I took at UT. But in Austin, I first started to get a sense of grass roots, where the plastic pop culture with which I had grown up became fused with the city's groovy laid back cosmic cowboy style. I got a sense of people in the streets. I got a sense of other races and ethnicities beyond the bland white bread suburban prefab existence I had known all my life. Once you see all that, once you get to understand that there is a veritable tapestry of cultures the human race has created all around the world, it becomes impossible not to value it all greatly.

Like I said above, I was also studying the mass media back in those days, so I also developed a keen awareness of how the entertainment industry, the advertising industry, political machines, and special interest groups are working tirelessly 24/7 to alter grass roots culture, sometimes even eliminate it, or even replace it with mass produced plastic cultural product. Sometimes it's just to make a buck. Most of the time, however, especially coming from the ad industry, but really from everybody, it's about making us all comfortable with materialism and the concept of getting rich. Selfishness, narcissism, conspicuous consumption, dominance by the few over the many, the acceptability of widespread poverty and suffering, and on and on and on.

I learned that the wealthy plutocrats who run the media use it not only to destroy the cultural gems that bubble up from the earth on which we walk, but also to replace it with fucking garbage. It is no wonder that I became a bleeding heart. I've been seeing for years now how the wealthy elites piss and shit on our culture and laugh about it on the way to the bank.

They should be overthrown if only for that. Of course, the great crimes of the so-called one percent go way above and beyond culture destruction: they actually kill people, in great quantities, whether through the wars they push us into or through denial of health care, or through pollution, and on and on and on.

Taibbi has it absolutely right about OWS. It's not a typical political movement; it's a cultural movement. And thank god: political movements can't do anything in this Mammon-dominated culture the elites have constructed over the decades. The whole fucking zeitgeist must change first.

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