Jimmy Breslin, a legendary NYC reporter and columnist who's been retired for 10 years, covered Occupy Wall Street in a column for the Daily News today.
For more than 40 years, Breslin worked to get the voices of working people into the stories and columns he wrote for various newspapers and magazines, most famously with his story about the guy who dug JFK's grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
As Tom Robbins wrote in the Village Voice in 2002:
The secret of (Breslin's) success is not the bluster and the blarney or the Irish newspaperman act that so easily lends itself to poseurs. It is instead a rock-hard sympathy with people of all colors in pursuit of simple things: job, love, school, home. Combined with a sense of history, a sense of humor, and an angry impatience with those swollen with power and self-importance, this has made him the city's steadiest and most accurate chronicler.
So it was natural that Breslin, even at 80, felt drawn to lower Manhattan this week.
More. below.
Breslin's column started out with the Transport Workers Union members who turned out yesterday, adding this observation:
The sheer number of the labor members showing up made the day perhaps the most significant we've had.
Laura Clawson would agree.
Breslin recalls the Vietnam-era time when young leftists demonstrating downtown were assaulted by union workers:
This was the start of a moving day that has not been seen in this city in a great many years, back when the unions were large and nasty to those who opposed the war in Vietnam back in the '60s and '70s.
Now yesterday, they joined hands with the young, and people were mostly orderly and all for the idea that the troops be pulled out of Afghanistan and that we need jobs for the young unemployed around here.
How things have changed, for the better in this instance.
Too many people Breslin's age are repelled by OWS, thanks in good part to the malign influence of Fox "News" and Republican radio.
But Breslin has been there, and did not see anything that would verify the "Communist"/"Nazi" propaganda promoted by the right-wing media.
And he recognizes that the kids have a point:
They were angry, and they shouted about the injustice of a tiny percentage of the rich getting richer, while the middle class endures foreclosures, dwindling savings and sudden losses in employment with the jobs going to places like China.
At no time in the last half century did anybody believe that the people who do not have are just that, Have Nothings.
If you want to know about important people, catch up with news of the wealthy. There is no sense asking about the poor.
It is good that the rallies at City Hall and Broadway were huge and heard.
There were thousands of older, middle-class, outer-borough, Fox "News" viewers/Republican radio listeners who read Jimmy Breslin today, because they know Jimmy Breslin has always spoken for them.
And they learned that the OWS demonstrators are also on their side.
Especially if they have children and grandchildren.