As many diaries have mentioned, due to recent events, the 1% is beginning to feel a little sweaty under the collars of their Georgio Armani suits. Grover Norquist Frank Luntz is "scared to death", and the conservative media machine has wasted no time in summoning all hands on deck to try to defuse the power of the awakening by any number of means, from calling the Occupiers dirty hippies who just need to take a bath and get a job to a characterization of the entire movement as nothing more than a vague manifestation of free-floating general discontent that knows neither were it is going nor what it wants to achieve. “What are their demands?” the talking heads chant in unison, answering their own question with a lie concocted to disempower and delegitimize: “Who knows? Impossible to know! They have no leaders, no goals, no direction, no message.”
OK, so let’s give them one. One so basic, so simple and straightforward they can have no doubt as to its meaning:
Your appointment with Mdm. N. is overdue.
The media shills and the Washington lackeys of the 1% are so rabid in their attempts to undermine precisely because their masters DO know exactly what is going on. They know that the sleeping beast, once awakened, will most likely not be kind to them. They know they have committed grievous and unforgivable sins against humanity. And the worst of all of the things they know but would never admit that they know, the thing that strikes fear to the very core of their being, they KNOW that History is NOT on their side. They know what happened in France in 1789. What happened in Russia in 1917. And the better educated among them know that these are only the more familiar and recent examples of a long list of social upheavals in civilized societies stretching back as far as recorded history. They KNOW that these are all manifestations of a basic principle which history has shown to be immutable time and time again; when social inequalities arrive to an extreme, a rebalancing is inevitable. They also know that history has shown that if push comes to shove, many of them could well come out the other side of the rebalancing process a head too short.
Of course, we know it, too. The well-educated among us are supremely aware of just how much danger we are all in. We know we are playing with fire. We know the only way to bring about change is to awaken the beast, but we also know that once the genie is out of the bottle, he may well conjure up something other than what we would desire. Hence the repeated insistence on non-violence at all Occupy manifestations. Even though we are committed to the power of peaceful protest, and the idea of change without violence, anyone with a smattering of knowledge of human nature and history knows how easily and how quickly it can all spin out of control, how quickly the match can arrive to the tinder.
Our challenge then, is to encourage each and every one of the 1% to willfully and of their own accord find their own personal Road to Damascus before push does indeed come to shove. Aye, therein lies the rub! How to achieve such an improbable thing? To this end, we should grasp this common knowledge we all share but dare not speak of and harness its power. For this is what haunts them in their nightmares and gnaws away at their inner peace whilst they try to go about their daily business as though nothing were amiss. It this knowledge, precisely, which is their greatest weakness, and therefore our greatest strength. But how to realize its tremendous potential power without descending to the level of the common Mafia thug who comes ‘round once each week and says “Hey! Nice business ya got here! What a pity if somethin’ were to happen to it. Or to you”
Simple. All we need is symbol, and luckily, one which is perfect for the task already exists. Has existed for thousands of years. A symbol which in our Western cultural heritage stands for one of the Uraltes Archetypes, a concept of social justice buried deep in our collective consciousness, an awareness of the wisdom of “doing the right thing” as opposed to the eventual disgrace and misery of doing the opposite. One symbol which brings together the concepts of indignation in the face of injustice, retribution for sins of excess, a grand settling of debts, a correction of imbalance, and above all, an inexorable manifestation of simple cause and effect according to the immutable laws of the universe:
NEMESIS
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Justice and Divine Vengeance (Nemesis) Pursuing Crime, c. 1805
From [http://www.theoi.com]:
NEMESIS was the goddess of indignation against, and retribution for, evil deeds and undeserved good fortune. She was a personification of the resentment aroused in men by those who committed crimes with apparent impunity, or who had inordinate good fortune.
Nemesis directed human affairs in such a way as to maintain equilibrium. Her name means she who distributes or deals out.
Nemesis was sometimes depicted as a winged goddess. Her attributes were apple-branch, rein, lash, sword, or balance. Her name was derived from the Greek words nemêsis and nemô, meaning "dispenser of dues."
and from [http://www.mythman.com/]
...woe be to the individual favored by Tyche who failed to give proper dues to the gods, became too full of himself and boasted of his abundant riches, or refused to improve the lot of his fellow humans by sharing his luck! Indignant Nemesis would step in and snap the fool back to reality, in short order humiliating him and causing his downfall.
What better description could be made of the motivations as well as the desired outcome of the Occupy movement? We don’t want violence. We don’t want them dead. We only demand equality and justice. We want the imbalances set aright. We demand that the abundant wealth of resources of our planet be managed wisely, harvested carefully, and distributed equally rather than be exploited rapaciously for the immediate short-term gain of a self-elected elite. We demand that the benefits of man’s advances in the fields of technology and science be used to improve the lot of all humanity, not to monitor, indoctrinate and subjugate them.
Imagine T-shirts of many designs but with one common thread: a depiction of the goddess and the single word NEMESIS. Imagine a simple marching chant: “We are your Nemesis.” Or simply “Nemesis. Nemesis.”
By invoking the goddess Nemesis as a symbol of the Occupy movement, we can send them a message that they otherwise would most certainly claim was a threat. That message is:
To the 1%:
You think you are special.
You think things have changed.
You think with your wealth, your power, your technology,
THIS time it will be different.
THIS time you will get away with it.
But this is nothing new.
This is what they all thought.
This is only hubris.
We’ve seen it all before...
1000 times, if not more.
We know how it ends.
YOU know how it ends.
We are the 99%,
and we have awakened.
We bring you tidings from NEMESIS.
Your time is up.
Alfred Rethel,
Nemesis, 1837
Wed Dec 07, 2011 at 2:12 PM PT: Thanx for all the positive feedback! Frankly, I'd love it if this went viral, not for any personal glory, but because I think the idea has tremendous power, which is why I wrote the diary. If first saw the Alfred Rethel painting when I was a young lad of 22 or so, and was like a jolt lightening. Even after all these years, every time I look at these paintings, they send shivers down my spine.
Anyway, been playin' around with a couple poster/T-shirt ideas. Check 'em out, give me your feedback, download and use 'em as is your wont, or take the idea and run with your own designs. 'Ere they are:
[http://i1212.photobucket.com/...]
[http://i1212.photobucket.com/...]
Wed Dec 07, 2011 at 2:19 PM PT: P.S. If anybody wants higher-res versions, let me know. I knocked these off quick-fast with the low-res version I had on photobucket.
Wed Dec 07, 2011 at 2:35 PM PT: OH! MY!! GOD!!! I just now realized that the thief in the Pierre-Paul Prud'hon paintings is a dead ringer for an unshaven NEWT GINGRICH!!!!!