In Doris Lessing’s novel, “The Good Terrorist”, there is a passage where she describes two of her characters coming back to their squat “smiling, and glowing with that special look of the successful demonstrator”. I often think of that when I go to demonstrations in Western democracies, such as November 17th’s Occupy Wall Street demo. Whatever the issues, there’s almost always a kind of manifest enjoyment shared by many of those taking part, derived perhaps from a feeling of shared purpose and community and taking part in an adventure that carries some risk of bruises or the inconvenience and discomfort of arrest, but offers opportunities to vent your righteous anger and be duly outraged at the behavior of the police and their shadowy masters. It feels like fun, and it is.
Critics of the Occupy Wall Street movement have been quick to play up this aspect of protest in liberal democracies. Because the risks are low - no one’s going to be ‘disappeared’ by the secret police, or shot from the rooftops by masked snipers - it’s easy to paint the protesters as hobbyist revolutionaries, unwashed kids and permanently-discontented neo-hippies who we’re not obliged to take seriously. The mainstream media, while feigning impartiality, drops continuous hints that the protesters are disorganized, incoherent and, above all, unrepresentative. Nothing to see here, move along. Conservatives go further still, seeing them all as Marxists (or Democrats, which in their minds amounts to the same thing). One particularly over-heated right-winger that I saw described them as “OWS thugs”, and implied that any discourse with these people was best conducted with nightsticks, if not bayonets.
Discredit the messenger, discredit the message. If you paint OWS as dirty hippies, you don’t have to listen to what they’re saying. (In fairness, liberal sections of the media managed to avoid considering whether the Tea Party might have a valid argument or two by painting them all as scary but comical rednecks and racists: turnabout is, I guess, fair play). There’s a handy Catch-22 at work: if you have the time to occupy Wall Street, you obviously don’t have a job, and if you don’t have a job, then you’re obviously not qualified to speak on … well, anything. Meanwhile, of course, most of those who do have jobs are trying to keep them. Their absence from the protests is taken as assent to the status quo, rather than as another indicator of how precarious our economic situation is.
Portraying OWS as immature, work-shy, naive, politically-suspect or unrepresentative is handy, not just for those with vested interests in the status quo, but for anyone who wants to find an excuse for their own apathy. Just remember that by the time the people you say you’ll be willing to accept as ‘representative’ finally descend into the streets, we’ll be in the late stages of a full-on revolution. Be careful what you wish for.
The message that we’re all working so hard to ignore is best summed up in the words of one famous sign carried by an OWS protester, which simply read “Shit is fucked-up and bullshit”. Rather than being inarticulate, it’s actually a succinct summary of what’s wrong: pretty much everything. In the eyes of the people who sympathize with OWS, our political and economic system is fundamentally broken - “fucked-up” - and riddled with dishonesty and corruption - “bullshit”.
If you need more specific examples, it’s not hard to find them. You could point to the way that the US has squandered vast sums on unnecessary and poorly-managed foreign adventures. You could point to the economic devastation wrought by financial speculators who, far from suffering the consequences of their actions, were promptly rescued by the government with lavish helpings of taxpayer money. You could point to the fact that politicians seem as deaf to the concerns of ordinary people as they are responsive to the whims of corporations and the wealthy. You could point to a political process virtually paralyzed by ideologically-driven partisan infighting, to the accelerating growth of a surveillance state, to our total inability to do anything rational about environmental issues or healthcare. Shit is indeed fucked-up and bullshit. Whatever the different signs may say, the root issue is just one thing: a fundamental crisis of confidence in the US economic and political system. And while you might not be prepared to accept the underwashed tent-dwelling drum-battering hippies of Zuccotti Park as your spokespeople, you’d be wrong to assume that they don’t matter. Think of them as the canary in the coal mine: the discontent and loss of confidence in our basic structures goes much deeper than that.
Occasionally, people suggest that OWS and the Tea Party might make common cause. Unless there’s a sea-change in the way American politics works, I can’t see that happening. The psychologies of the people who make up the two movements are too different: they viscerally distrust each other for reasons that might reasonably be described as tribal. But what’s significant is that both movements represent rejections of the established political parties and the prevailing political system. They’re not so much radicals as they are people who have fundamentally lost faith in the possibility of progress through the current system.
You could probably say the same thing about the Founding Fathers.
