http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper/behind-the-snarking-about_b_1065830.html
Jim Sleeper <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper>
Political Science Lecturer, Yale University
Behind The Snarking About OWS
Posted: 10/31/11 11:38 AM ET
In Zuccotti Park a few Sundays ago a noose of news cameras tightened
quickly around a willowy, long-haired woman, her parchment face lined
with the gentle cares of an aging, slightly dotty humanities professor.
She had begun dancing alone, shoeless and trance-like in a long, Indian
skirt and simple top in the Indian Summer light.
No such circle formed around two college students I was talking with
nearby. One, a tall, pale, boy from Syracuse, had taken a six-hour bus
ride to join the occupation because he felt he'd "been had" by
misleading information about his student loan. The other a solid,
fine-featured University of Connecticut student, works summers and
weekends in his Dad's construction business and likes Ron Paul because
"He's the only candidate telling the truth about what the banks and big
corporations are doing to us."
Either of the students might have stepped out of a fable of the early
republic, and such young patriots far outnumbered the exotics and
agitators paraded before us on zoom-in videos and in sinuous jottings.
Everyone knows by now that anything reminiscent of 1960's hippies and
agitators is ripe fruit for commercial media. It's a ratings-booster
that whets a growing appetite for flailing the Ghosts of Left-Liberalism
Past.
But it's not just about ratings and bottom lines. Republican
presidential debates, and even "liberal" magazines' online comment
threads, are drawing hundreds eager to rail at clueless dissenters,
especially if they can catch them bickering with one another. What dark,
swift undercurrent are driving this venom and some "journalists'"
inclination to feed it?
Feed it they do, as Frank Rich noted briefly in his important /New York
Magazine/ essay, "The Class War Has Begun."
<http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/class-war-2011-10/> Although many
reporters have been surprised and nonplussed by the good vibes and
"substance"-free living they find in the parks, a few act as if they can
hardly wait for something worse to set in: Just look at all the
indecision, the self-indulgence, the distempers, the slovenliness! It's
'Lord of the Flies' down there! But what a relief to see that these
moralists aren't so pure, eh mates? The last thing any of us should feel
is guilty!
So say Murdoch's imported minions and their American colonial emulators.
The park occupants aren't the solution, they're the problem! Why blame
America's distress on its deepening inequalities when someone doing a
pointillist inspection of the remonstrants in Zuccotti Park can write
that an organizer there was behaving as if "All occupiers are equal -
but some occupiers are more equal than others" ?
So wrote another observer
<http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/10/occupy_animal_farm_the_organiz.html>
for /New York Magazine/, adapting the the ruling slogan of the pigs from
/Animal Farm,/ George Orwell's novelistic send-up of Stalinist
totalitarianism, and hanging it around the neck of an OWS organizer who
burst out, in a moment of exasperation, "Someone has to be told what to
do. Someone needs to give orders. There's no sense of order in this
fucking place."
With that, the account ends, but only after having informed us that the
word "fucking" dropped from /three/ pairs of lips! And that a long-time
occupier from Tennessee "asked that his name not be used due to a felony
marijuana conviction" ! And that a tussle over a tent showed that while
"[a]ll belongings and money in the park are supposed to be held in
common,... property rights reared their capitalistic head when
facilitators went to clean up the park, which was looking more like a
shantytown than usual after several days of wind and rain."!
Bingo! Presenting the occupation as a shantytown ruled by Orwellian pigs
drew 7900 Facebook recommendations and more than 200 posted comments on
the story's website. Never mind that I went down to Zuccotti Park again
last Saturday night, October 29 -- in a driving, sleeting rain -- and
found much bustle amid good order and spirits that still overwhelmed the
jaundiced reports.
Still, a comment representative of many posted beneath the disparaging
account just mentioned insists that "Reality is setting in for the
protests! Sounds like the leaders are strong-arming money from the real
earners. Sounds like the big government to me. Hey protestors-- Is this
what you were looking for? .....Welcome to the real world." Another
declares that "Either [OWS] will implode by virtue of its refusal to
comport with reality; or many of the counter-productive... behaviors
will continue to escalate until it must be forcibly suppressed.... It
is, after all, the tragic nature of men (and women) to incrementally
press the envelope until they arrive at their own doom, or are thwarted
by an insurmountable barrier or unstoppable force."
The encampments may not be with us for long even if cops and the cold
don't disperse them. But wasn't it really "the tragic nature" of "the
real world" in the United States itself that prompted these occupations
all across the country? Cherry-picked vignettes and posted jeers that
miss this elephant are themselves testimony to that larger reality - and
to the unreality in denials of it: The testimony is unwitting when its
scribblers and their fans become obsessed with /anything/ that keeps
them from having to look in directions the protesters are actually pointing.
If, for example, critics of Occupy Wall Street are disgusted by its want
of clear agendas and decisions, shouldn't they express more disgust at
the dearth of clear agendas and decisions on Wall Street and in
Washington? The incompetence and bad faith of those circles in our
post-republican hell yawned abysmally at the whole nation's feet in the
near-meltdown of 2008 and in the game of chicken that forced the idiotic
debt-ceiling crisis last summer. Becoming preoccupied with kids in parks
sounds like denial to me, and more than a little perverse.
The keen inspectors of the occupiers' foibles write up their reports as
if the national and world authorities, policy intellectuals, and
corporate managers and boards of directors who've led millions of
Americans into sink-pits of casino finance, joblessness, homelessness,
and fogs of war were clearer-sighted than youths not yet drawn into
their subtlest corruptions, marginal souls never integrated into them,
and elders who see through them after decades of enduring them, Are the
hand signals at OWS assemblies any more quixotic than the daily
gesticulating and bellowing on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange?
And if "there's no sense of order in this fucking place," doesn't that
more accurately describe a whole country whose pathological,
multi-problem over-class has been rioting for decades, not just in the
aberrational affronts of Leona Helmsley, Enron's Kenneth Lay, Bernard
Madoff, deranged, priapic pastors and priests, and sleazy mortgage
brokers and foreclosure artists of Cleveland and Queens, but also, and
more tellingly, of the panjandrums of grand strategy in the Bush
Administration, the Federal Reserve, and corporations whose practices
the present administration and Congress have only sustained?
"Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the
naďve psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to
his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order
without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as
a lamb bleating in the desert," wrote the great economic historian R.H.
Tawney in 1926. He added pointedly that the arrogant assumption that
marginal people's "distress is a proof of demerit... has always been
popular with the prosperous."
Apparently that assumption is still popular in Republican debate
audiences and among online commenters terrified of losing what little
they have and desperately seeking targets that are easier to blame than
the powerful interests that are actually taking them down.
If it's the occupiers' unsanitary dishabille and unsavory conduct that
upsets their critics, might we compare the conditions in the parks with
the sanitation, sanity, and law-abidingness in Congress, the major
investment banks, and the New York Police Department?
My challenge isn't metaphorical. How do health hazards posed by the Wall
Street encampments compare with those posed by members of Congress'
sexual hi-jinx, their stealing, and their bought-and-paid for
evisceration of public investments in health, unemployment security, and
other protections against disease and stress? Don't get me started on
crime rates among cops. I wrote for New York City tabloids for seven
years. I'll hand that assignment to anyone who claims he's just telling
the truth about Occupy Wall Street.
Shortly after assessing sartorial standards and /basse couture/ in
Zuccotti Park on my first visit there some weeks ago, I came upon a news
report that students in an elite "Studies in Grand Strategy" program at
Yale had been notified by the program of a special discount being
offered them by a tailor from Bangkok and that they'd been advised,
"Once you have a custom suit, it's really hard to go back." Considering
the grand-strategic comedy of errors this country has been living
through, I couldn't help wondering which group is wearing the clown suits.
But it isn't really so funny. Not only did Orwell write /Animal Farm/ to
revivify Stalinism's monstrous orchestrations of terror and deception;
he reported them "on the ground" in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. After
joining a democratic leftist organization to fight the fascist dictator
Francisco Franco, Orwell watched Stalinist Communists, supposed
champions of democracy, killing not only fascists but also leftists and
democrats who sought a republic, not submission to Moscow.
"The Communist influence in Barcelona was not progressive but
reactionary," he wrote, but leftist British newspapers wouldn't publish
his report. So he wrote /Homage to Catalonia,/ which also had trouble
finding a publisher: Fascism was so obviously bad that no one wanted to
hear that some of his opponents might be equally bad.
A writer of Orwell's integrity -- he sustained physical as well as
professional wounds for it -- will report the truth, anyway, when both
militant sides in a conflict are deeply wrong. But is this one of those
times? Are the occupiers of Wall Street quite as bad as Stalin's
Communists and Orwell's pigs? Why insinuate as much while affecting to
report "just the facts" and leaving it to anonymous readers to make your
disparagement more explicit than you were willing to make it?
For some fresh air, turn to Martin Wolf, a /Financial Times/ columnist
who's hardly an opponent of capitalism but isn't a sinuous scourge of
its opponents, either, at least not when their insights are right and
their anger clean:
Assessing OWS' emergence, Wolf asks, "Is this the beginning of a
resurgent leftwing politics? I doubt it. Are the protesters raising some
big questions? Yes they are..... If the traditional left offers no
answer, can the free market right return to business as usual? No.
People who believe in the marriage of democratic politics with market
economics need to address what has happened...., because there are
darker forms of politics waiting in the wings: Nationalism, chauvinism,
and racism."
Maybe the self-appointed Captain Renaults who say they're shocked,
shocked, by what they've uncovered in the occupations should expend less
energy exposing feckless hippies and agitators and take a look in the
mirror. "Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face," wrote W.
H. Auden in the darkening interwar years, and the new carping is part of
syndrome that's even older: OWS isn't quite the Continental Army
wintering at Valley Forge, yet one can easily imagine today's detractors
trying to demoralize that soggy, somewhat dissolute revolutionary army
during the times that tried men's souls.
The Tories of those times lacked the media tools the occupiers' critics
abuse now. But it's their heirs who've cast the filmmaker Michael Moore
as more dangerous to the republic than the deciders he assailed; who've
lambasted Ned Lamont, the anti-war insurgent against Senator Joseph
Lieberman in 2006, as a vicious netroots crazy; and who've damned damns
public-sector unions as the main causes of non-unionized workers' despair.
The reason some writers hawk scapegoats like these instead of telling
the truth as Wolf does and Orwell did is that they're riding
undercurrents that run so swiftly and deeply in their own lives and
surroundings that they aren't quite conscious of them and so don't
reflect on why they're giving them legitimacy and added force.
The French word for this predicament -- /ressentiment /(pronounced
"ruh-/sohn/ tee-/monh/") - denotes a public psychopathology in which
gnawing insecurities, envy, and hatreds that have been nursed by many in
private (and posted anonymously in comments online) converge eventually
in scary social eruptions that diminish the participants even while
seeming to make them brave participants in great crusades.
In such eruptions "the little-big man" seeks easy targets like civil
servants or kids and kooks in parks and hungers to avenge himself
against them for his exploitation at the hands of bigger powers he fears
to face head-on. /Ressentiment /warps his reckonings with his hardships
and opportunities. It shapes the disguises he puts on in order to pursue
vindication without risking reproach until there are enough of him (and
her, of course) to defy it together /en masse/, with a Glenn Beck or
Sarah Palin.
/Ressentiment / sometimes goads such mass movements into a fleeting
brilliance, but they curdle and collapse, tragi-comically or
catastrophically, on their own cowardice, ignorance, and lies. There's
something really sad about frightened, grasping people who succumb to
this. But there's something contemptible about those who knowingly
channel /ressentiment/ against the vulnerable few who are trying to call
attention to its real causes.
"Journalists" who caricature such Americans, assembling peaceably to
petition for a redress of grievances and to map out alternatives, can be
nimble and rigorous in selecting their targets among the dissidents,
poking their wounds, and serving them up like the ripe fruit for the
high-ratings and appetites their coverage serves and reflects. Doing
that makes them successful. But it also softens up their public for the
destructive nationalism, chauvinism, and racism that Wolf mentions and
that a look in the mirror might reveal in themselves. Let's hope that
they'll get this message before they find themselves packing their bags
to flee a society they've helped to ruin.
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