What is it about the Very Serious People that gets them so worked up by Occupy that they can’t think or talk straight?
Watching them try to get a handle on The Great Occupy reminds you of someone trying to dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper and deeper.
There’s this bigshot economist and professor guy, for instance, Peter Morici. Kind of guy who ducks his dull low-paying academic work by pimping himself out as an op-ed writer to the moneyed classes. Recently, he offered (harrumph) to explain this Disagreeable Recent Turmoil for readers of The Street. The Street, you may know, is a Jim-Cramer-clotted online advice rag, advising 1%ers how to maximize their local optima—a.k.a. make a shitpile of money and damn the consequences.
Morici opens with this observational gem:
Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are really the same species.
This sort of equivalency might sound familiar. Drawing parallels between the Tea Party and Occupy constitutes something of an Orphan Annie Decoder Ring for the puzzled, a means of unlocking what the dirty hippies are up to. But employing it is a tacit admission. That when you look at what’s going down, it is way more than ain’t exactly clear. And at heart it’s also lazy—a mulish refusal to take a thing seriously enough to think very hard about.
Ah, but lazy mulishness is Peter Morici’s stock in trade.
Ordinary Americans -- whether they work for a small business or large, or are self-employed or unemployed, have reason to be upset. Jobs are disappearing and incomes are falling, health insurance costs are rocketing and universities charge exorbitant tuition to crank out high-quality unemployment.
That last sentence, now. There you get the first whiff that Occupy has melted some of Morici’s cranial wiring. The cause of unemployment is education failing to supply workers for the jobs that are available. Oh, ho! This is a classic (and neoclassic) trick: render down complex problems by reducing wholes to a few noninteracting, mechanical, linkless, monotone, isolated parts.
Hence—as they say--there’s really plenty of work, if the colleges would just quit wasting time and money teaching crap that doesn’t bring home a paycheck! They ought to shitcan those degrees in psychology and literature, and instead teach hamburger-frying, or lettuce-picking!
Having muddled map and territory, Morici sneaks this wowzer in beneath the smoke: Here is the difference, he says, between the Tea Partier and Occupier: One is a plucky, intelligent, caring soul who wants morality to prevail. And one is an ill-informed, vaguely furious submoron, funded and easily manipulated by secretive rich overlords to do their dark bidding.
You will never guess which he thinks is which.
I take that back. Of course you will. You’ve seen this movie a thousand times. There’s no surprise here. But it still boggles, a supposed thinking person uttering such thorough horseshit as this:
Occupy Wall Street is wrong and ineffective. If it has a common mind, then the movement believes spontaneous acts of public outrage -- a.k.a. tantrums in the park and more government are the answer when they simply are not.
And the, um, responsible alternative?
The Tea Party…a political movement in the best American tradition -- citizens seeing a problem and arming themselves to solve it through the ballot box.
—As opposed to those tantrum throwers dressing up in silly clothes and in spontaneous public outrage tossing
tea into the harbor.
I hope you also caught that sly earlier “more government” dig. Because that is the next focus of the eminent economist Herr Doktor Prof. Peter Morici’s laser-sharp analytic mind:
The Tea Party has it right: These abuses result from too much, not too little, government
How’s that, now?
[The abuses stem from] federal giveaways and over-regulation that the banks, big companies and unions…game and abuse to keep small competitors at a disadvantage.
Whee! Really? Like Tom Wolfe’s needle-thin umber bird, Morici has begun to fly in desperately decreasing circles, finally to disappear up his own fundament. Imagine—insisting that for those clever thieves, gaming vast numbers of regulations represents an easier path to filthy riches than the absence of any regulation at all.
This is a standard formulation of the frightened Right. How we are ruled by puppet-masters who are at once uber-powerful and also terrified at revealing their power. It is why people like Peter Morici apparently believe that great effort has gone into making it appear for all the world that the absence of regulation let banks slice, dice, securitize and derivatize, leaving a mess for the public to clean up; that an overabundance of regulators stood aside to let the big companies spill tons of toxic waste, leaving a mess for the public to clean up; that gobs of government meddlers was what permitted the loading of pallets of bundled money postmarked “Somewhere, Iraq,” and the subsequent looting of the treasury by (nonunionized) mercenary corporations conducting war on the behalf of a nation to whom they owe no allegiance—leaving the mess for the public to clean up.
As for those other members of the species Americanus pisssoffii? It is, says Morici,
a huge swath of upset and confused American...hijacked by the professional left. Unable to organize and sustain themselves, big unions and left-wing foundations provides kitchens, tents and cots in the hopes of using these disoriented citizens to legitimize and further their agenda.
You get a disquieting sense, here. This is a person unable to comprehend what is right in front of him. (As well as someone with a shaky grasp of syntax—you have to read that last sentence twice or three times to figure out he does not really mean to warn us against the organized, sustained threat posed by groups too disoriented to sustain or organize themselves).
Among these professional leftists is President Obama, who has “embraced the movement.” And Elizabeth Warren, and Barney Frank, too.
The same folks that gave us expensive "bank reforms" that concentrated the majority of deposits in the hands of a few Wall Street Banks, near-zero interest rates on CDs making it almost impossible for regional banks to write adequate numbers of mortgages and business loans, and abusive debit card fees.
Once again, these devilish manipulators who cannot bear scrutiny—the clever big unions pretending to be shrinking all these years, and left-wing foundations with (secretly) more money than the right-wing foundations—have managed the slick trick of making it look like it was the lack of business customers and sufficient employment that was slowing mortgages and business loans. Oh, the perfidy!
In this derivative-like world, you must take at face value what those on the Left might say, and at the same time assume its opposite. Thus, despite appearing to urge people to move their money out of concentrated big banks to credit unions, and marching in defiance of fees, they actually support raised fees and concentrated deposits!
Ach. This is how these people make sense of the world.
But like a lot of the 1%ers and their enablers, Morici has mostly a terrible time digesting the strange, salty-sweet concoction that is Occupy. It seems beyond him. I mean, how can the protestors can be so angry yet unarmed and mostly pacifist and so goddamned unfailingly cheery?
What IS it they want? If they would just want something. Please, beg the 1%ers and their enablers. Issue a list of demands, so we can get down to bribing, pressuring, and co-opting you!
And because these folks weigh all things to a nicety in the scales of their own malice, because the only measure they know is power, that is how they judge all hearts.
No doubt who the Service Employees International Union will support for the White House and Senator from Massachusetts in 2012.
If the support of the SEIU for Occupy is ominous and manipulative, how is it that the Koch Brothers’ support for the Tea Party is not? And yet, this particular equivalency doesn’t seem to have crossed Morici’s mind.
Finally, Professor Morici, his lips specked with spittle, reveals himself.
Occupy Wall Street reminds me of college demonstrations.
There we have it. A description that could only be offered by a person who was alive in the sixties—but who wasn’t alive in the sixties.
You know, the guy who didn’t go in for all this psychedelic modern liberation stuff, for Hendrix, or Joplin, or Jefferson Airplane, the guy who was up there in his dorm room studying econ, trying to make something of himself, listening to the Andy Williams and the Tijuana Brass while you DFHs were out smoking dope and protesting on the quad.
Nineteen-year-olds upset, and manipulated by left-wing professors and outside organizers like Ralph Nader.
Nader?
Nader is in charge? I though it was Joan Baez! Or Tim Leary, maybe!
This is the kind of goofy stuff Occupy seems to engender. Descriptions and prescriptions drawn from a history these powerful lost souls think they remember: how the country got past the hippie and yippie days, how it got over the disagreeable college campus occupations, racial unrest, protests against the Viet Nam war. How things wobbled, but eventually got back to where things were supposed to be, where business could be transacted.
Couple problems with this Villager frame, however. One, these folks ain’t the same as back in the day. They’re quicker, more agile, more savvy. They learned some things, from some intervening events even the Villagers may have heard of: Solidarnosc, the Singing Revolution, las arpilleristas, South Africa. Tiananmen and Tahrir Squares.
Two, the Villagers didn’t exactly grok the thing, back then. Okay, after a while they did start wearing colorful clothes, and might have tried some pot, and now you hear Magic Carpet Ride over the speakers at the Piggly Wiggly.
But it is still true, what Ken Kesey said in 1967. Watching the bewildered press touring the Haight, taking notes, trying desperately to get a bead on what the hell this “hippie movement” was all about, Kesey drawled, “They know where it is—they just don’t know what it is.”
It is also true what the Tao says: “If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick.”
So, yo, Villagers. Morici. If you can’t stop clamoring for a demand, try this on for size.
If you socialize the risk, socialize the reward.
Because the rest of us are damned sick of cleaning up after you assholes.