The other day I wrote an article about OWS to submit for publication to my favorite national magazine. I think it was the best thing I've ever written. I had a spiritual awakening while writing it over the course of two days. Seriously, I've had less enjoyable sex. I was elated.
I sent it to my friend Sandra for feedback. She said, "So far I love it, but this line is confusing:"
"As the 99% of Americans rewrite our future, we must be clear as to what sort of book we hope to end up with."
I thought it was pretty clear myself. She said, "Well, it's only like 1% of the population that determines how things will go." The other friends I asked to read it never got back to me. I can hear them thinking, "Oh, I can't be the one who breaks the bad news. Xavier thinks this is actually going to change something. Silly rabbit."
I honestly don't see any way that the status quo comes through OWS intact. For one thing, I felt the shift from a place deep inside me. And no, that wasn't lactose intolerance, stop! It was the same feeling I had when I heard John McCain had chosen Sarah Palin. My first thought: Hello President Obama! There was a physical sensation, and I had it again with OWS. People didn't believe me about the Sarah Palin death knell, either.
I spent two days feeling my consciousness shift about OWS, and the more I wrote about it the clearer it became. We have reached the tipping point. This is really it.
Gandhi famously broke the process down into four steps:
They ignore you
They mock you
They fight you
You win.
Step 1 happened with OWS as predicted. It was more than a week before mainstream media started to talk about all the people in the streets.
Step 2 came next, with of course the usual suspects saying the usual nonsense. Boss Limbaugh called the protestors human debris. Gretchen Carlson couldn't make any sense of it all -- SURPRISE! Gretchen can't follow SpongeBob. But it wasn't just the same old pile of turds making the usual stench.
CNN's new host/sorority mean girl Erin Burnett broke out her best Gretchen Carlson impersonation in an apparent pre-audition for Fox. She got right to the really important information - what brand of yoga pants people had, the fact that they were using cell phones, some people were playing music, and they had food and sports drinks. This was apparently meant to make them appear hypocritical.
They wear clothing, communicate with loved ones, and eat and drink and poop. Because they're human beings. I know this is really hard for corporate America to understand, because they've only been "human beings" for a short time, so they have no idea what it's all about. But yeah, there's a food/fluid intake/output thing that happens with the authentic version.
Erin leveraged the fact that the people attending this rally are average, decent Americans who are looking to communicate and cooperate, and they don't understand that she's a shark with tits. No offense to sharks. (This, former half-governor, is actual "gotcha" journalism -- where you set the entire agenda rather than asking the interviewee for their point of view.)
According to Fox's next top chickenhead, the whole thing has been solved. She's reduced them to a caricature and then, in her own mind at least, flicked them away like a booger. Why haven't they gone home Erin?
Because that was a Phase 2 report, and we're now moving into Phase 3.
Shortly before almost getting an impromptu mustache trim, Geraldo was saying how the crowd seemed random and disorganized. To which any sane person might ask what he expected; should they line up single file and goosestep? Maybe they look random because this country is a melting pot, and this is a large cross-section of its people. Not the corporate people, the human people. Like the citizens comma united, not the Citizens United.
The right wing often employs the useful idiot, and right now they have the truly, madly, deeply idiotic Allen West. (Remember he was the one who offered to drive the car for the metaphorical violent attack that would have to be denied later and couldn't be explained in advance? And they weren't even asking for a driver! D'OH!) So Professor West is once again looking for a grenade to jump on. Here he is feeling around for just enough sugar to make a batch of crazy juice that will make everybody want seconds:
From ThinkProgress
"Allen West: I truly believe President Barack Obama does not comprehend American exceptionalism. He does not fathom that in America the station of your birth does not determine the station of your outcome. America is not about class or caste, it is about rewarding individuals for their drive and determination, for their hard work and ideas."
Harriet Tubman impersonator/getaway driver/Congressman West is rightfully annoyed. If you want to become president, all you have to do is be born biracial and raised on food stamps by a low-income single mother, just like all the past presidents and other top echelon people. He's exactly right, that isn't fair to people like G.W. Bush. Let's stop having black presidents from low-income families and start giving the silver spoons a chance.
"Allen West: America is about the individual and not about a collective. We are not like “The Borg” of Star Trek. Liberal progressives do not want to unleash our individual strength, they prefer to foment collective divisiveness, which is exactly what this “Occupy Wall Street” movement is about."
It never ceases to amaze me when right wingers talk about what I think, want and prefer. Mostly it's because they make stuff up out of whole cloth and are usually surprised when I don't sign off on it. I've had more than one tea partier tell me that Bill O'Reilly is neutral, and routinely covers the left's point of view. Well he does cover our point of view - he dumps a truckload of manure on it every chance he gets.
But back to Harriet West, Getaway Rocket Surgeon. I don't have anywhere near the amount of brain cells left to be able to compute "collective divisiveness." So we come together to divide? OWS is united in its division? I think that's wingnut for "those people who want to get along and work together make me so mad!" That's the only explanation I can figure.
More amazingly, OWS is the Borg. The Borg! The cybernetic hive mind that does not reason or feel; they don't negotiate, they assimilate. Resistance is futile. Most importantly, there's nothing unique about them. If you kill one, another identical one pops up.
Within a day or two they went from a gaggle of random nuts and flakes with a mishmash of murky messages to unyielding, interchangeable cyborgs who refuse to communicate. First it was too confusing because they're all so different from each other, and yet they all felt the need to go to the same park at the same time and stay together. They were all moving about freely and expressing themselves as they saw fit, which made it hard to pigeonhole them.
Then they became destructive, unfeeling cyborgs who act in lockstep to overtake all they encounter. You'd have to be as bad at critical thought as Fox apparently thinks their friends are to believe that OWS constitutes a depersonalized hive mind.
I suspect Professor West is acting as lab rat for Frank Luntz's current crisis management strategy. They're test marketing how to turn this thing around, after Fox's own poll showed that 70% of their viewers support OWS. How can we spin this away from an obvious truth that we can no longer avoid? How can we made the average citizens of the country look crazy for being able to do basic math? How can we make idiots in Kentucky form a hillbilly Taliban? I know! We'll market unity as evil. We'll say that the OWS people are dividing everybody by being so united.
That's what it comes down to. The two-dimensional brigade, the folks who really are Fox's friends, have managed to once again boil the entire thing down to a Boolean query. The brotherhood of man is bad. And it probably violates states' rights. There is definitely a segment of the population that doesn't "understand divide conquer" well enough to opt out of it, and they make up about 30% of Fox's audience.
No wonder they're upset. They must be having the same visceral understanding I had, but from the other side. They think OWS is the Borg because they instinctively know there's nothing they can do to stop it. It must suck to know, deep in your bones, that you're on the losing side of history. They've managed to get away with being anti-science for a long time. Unfortunately they're about to learn that you can deny evolution all you want, but it's still going on all around you.
Word of advice to Erin Burnett - practice your upskirt, honey, that's part of the job on Fox.