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On the Wall Street 'occupation'

by Robert Teitelman | Published September 30, 2011 at 12:26 PM

Wall Street remains occupied -- just not by protesters. Zuccotti Park remains occupied, which is not exactly the same thing. The rest of the place, which is no longer the true epicenter of financial power except in tourist brochures and folklore, is pretty placid, beyond the police presence and barriers. Residents walk their dogs; the office crowd trudges the stony streets. John Cassidy from The New Yorker, which will eventually move a few blocks from Zuccotti in World Trade Center 1, came by to visit what he refers to as the "encampment" in Zuccotti and wrote about it as if he were dropping into a Taliban stronghold. I stroll by this "encampment" at least once a day, listening to the thumping music that sounds like a high school band at a football game, reviewing the cardboard signs laid out like a museum exhibit and checking out the various characters, causes and cops. It's more like mini-Woodstock than the Taliban.

Cassidy is sympathetic to the occupation, and he thinks their numbers, which he estimates at a few hundred (that seems right), are growing after the pepper-spraying incident the other day. That is certainly not obvious to me, though it is hard to tell the tourists, the protest flybys, the office workers and commuters from actual protesters; and it's hard to tell what effect the "support" of unions like the SEIU or transport workers union will make. His description of the participants seems accurate however: "The protesters appeared to be a motley assortment of slackers, students, environmentalists, socialists, feminists, and hippies. It is easy to lampoon such folks, just as it easy to poke fun at the retirees, gun lovers, and pro-lifers that man the Tea Party information booths. But like the conservative enragés that have taken over parts of the Republican Party, these protesters have a serious issue that motivates them: the purported takeover of the political system by the richest one per cent of the population, as symbolized by Wall Street."

Hippies! I knew they looked familiar. Cassidy's meme that the Occupation represents a sort of progressive Tea Party is getting around. There's an element of wishful thinking there, but then you never know. Last night on MSNBC, Van Jones, an environmental activist who got run out of his Obama White House "green jobs" staff position by the Tea Party, bludgeoned the very same point in an attempt to channel the movement into Washington-based protests organized through his own operation, Rebuild the Dream. Jones predicted "an October offensive to take back the American dream and rebuild the American dream" and picked up on the theme the Occupy Wall Street crowd likes to embrace, that they represent an offshoot of the Arab Spring. Alas, Jones, in his tie and sports jacket, looked just like the kind of politico the Zuccotti crowd is bound not to follow.

Well, OK. Does it matter that so far the numbers are relatively small -- early on, the organizers predicted 20,000 -- the "occupation" is a pipe dream and that, as the blogosphere has been debating, the protesters seem to represent every left political and social position in a country notorious for freethinkers: from capitalism is bad to evil banks to social inequality to a variety of personal liberation movements (nudism, love yourself, etc.). My favorite sign: "Solidarity with Canada." This is not making fun of these folks; these are simply observations. Like Van Jones, like Cassidy, like Glenn Greenwald, or like the organizers of this purportedly leaderless movement, the rush is on by the political mainstream to lay an interpretation of what this thing is "really" about. For Cassidy it's about resisting takeover by the wealthy; for Van Jones it's saving the middle class (he should look more closely: this crowd is far more bohemian than bourgeois); for Greenwald, it's crony capitalism and financial corruption; for the unions, well, you guess. The occupiers themselves can't seem to get beyond identifying themselves as the embodiment of some pure, and as they march, self-righteous (if on beat) embodiment of democracy, which suggests that everyone else is in the bag to plutocrats and fascists.

Do we really wish for a Tea Party of the left? Do we really want to inject the same sort of fervent, take-no-prisoner, apocalyptic fantasies that characterize much of the Tea Party into an already wracked body politic? The answer, from the liberal punditocracy, is sure, as long as we can define the issues that matter. But I've read the signs and heard the chants. And it's true: In its incoherence and eagerness to embrace the simplest slogans, untainted by any sense of knowledge, information or hard thought, Occupy Wall Street does resemble the Tea Party. It's anarchic. But that to me is a worrisome sign, not something to celebrate. It's one thing to say that somewhere in their minds they are motivated by a serious issue. That's true of many of the folks in this country. But that doesn't make their various solutions, demands, truths, half-truths and follies necessarily something to embrace or celebrate.

Do they have a right to protest and bang their drums? Absolutely -- though I do wonder where the folks who once used Zuccotti Park to lunch or watch their kids have gone. And I find myself, as I walk past, hearing my parents mutter in the late '60s, "Those damn long-haired kids," and cringing. This is a complicated issue, particularly for a baby boomer. Vietnam and civil rights were important, even moral issues; more importantly, they were (it seems now) relatively focused. But around those powerful issues swirled the carnival -- the music, the drugs, the guys looking for girls, and vice versa, the show offs, the exhibitionists, the cultists, the utopians and increasingly the fanatics and worse. As celebrated as those student-led protests were, they also triggered an even more powerful backlash, which the liberal pundits -- as Rick Perlstein shows in great detail in "Nixonland" -- refused to acknowledge for years, and which may have fueled the next three or four decades of conservative tilt. This democracy business is complicated too.

Of course we're still talking about a few hundred young souls camping out in a concrete public park. There is always, of course, a kind of tragedy that lurks beneath any "spontaneous" protest based on emotion and individual self-expression, right or left; many are drawn to the movement because of its diversity, spontaneity and ability to contain a variety of views. But if the movement grows, it requires shape, leadership and discipline; and with that comes a narrowing of ideals and goals -- and real, difficult questions about democratic governance. The rise of its political potency stifles the very freedom of thought and behavior that brought it so euphorically together. But that's an adult thought about what's still a children's crusade. - Robert Teitelman

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