Leaderless feel-good stuff sounds great in theory, but the "In theeeoory" joke was a hundred years old when the Simpons put Mr. burns and Homer on a raft to Cuba (or was it from Cuba). This communal stuff is not new, it has very long and rich history of abject failure going back at least to 1848 and possibly a lot longer.
That's the kind of "university student clap-trap" I'm talking about. Early on, there was a Tabbibi article (I think it's linked farther back in this thread) about some core messages to focus on. I don't really have a beef with collective leadership - I'm not arguing that we need a MIGHTY MASTER-RACE LEADER to turn the OWS crowd into some kind of brownshirt army - but regardless of whether the leadership was dispersed or focused, a solid message focus would have been really good! Having a message based on three or five key points and hammering away with that message would have also been really good!
But nothing like that happened. Everything I heard said to me that these people were putting style ahead of substance, worrying about communications methods, group leadership or whatever. Whenever they tried to do anything up here, they had a vastly lower turnout than they should have, because planning for marches or whatever was total SHIT. These people were fucking USELESS for getting anything done. I think the Toronto OWS crowd may have been worse than most for that, but it's a story I hear repeated in many cities.
That doesn't mean their greivances aren't real, but it does mean that they were way out of their league. And arguably made no attempt to play catch-up.
To enact real change, you need to get people with their hands on the levers to start buying in. That's how Civil Rights was enacted (or, more recently, tolerance of same-sex couples). Partially from below, but also from the top and the middle. The thing is, I don't see that. For all the ballyhoo about working people joining OWS, most folks are still in denial mode, clinging desperately to the imagined middle-class life of the past several decades (This is natural, this is how the "down" side of the slope works).
I mean, we can try and put lipstick on this pig all we want, but this is not getting any prettier. People had their say and then they got bulldozed. I agree with Brentai's 70%/30% argument, but I still think those exact percentages are optomistic. Like if the 30% is the really tough part, I don't think of that as 30%. It's great to say you raised awareness of your cause, but Fred fucking Phelps can make the same sort of claim.
It's like that story about the cop who said he refused to participate in further supression. Yeah, that's great, but he's ONE GUY. Now, that IS how stuff gets started, but things never progressed from there. You can't keep pointing to isolated cases of agreement and call that a success.
Show me real stuff. Show me congressmen or senators at OWS rallies - or even show me some public statements of support! Were there ever more than one or two? I sure as hell saw more quotes along the lines of "get a bar of soap, hippies!" or long discussions by right-wing "middle-americans" about how the protests were supposedly orgies of rape.
Maybe you guys forget, but this forum bends pretty left, though usually in a reasonable centre-left kind of way. Other places I go are full of vitriol and scorn for OWS. And not in my disappointed "they didn't get the fucking job done" way, but in the dismissive hatred of walking GOP stereotypes.
I mean, okay, if we want to go the full Constantine, then we can say that the US government is no longer a Democracy in even the thinnest sense of the word and that [insert tirade against the semi-secret oligarchy here]. Maybe you'll even say that the protestors were on message, but that the "mainstream media" is really just the tool of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
But given that the government and even the media was still partially responsive and useful even fifteen years ago, I can't really agree. Maybe you guys will eventually wind up there, but even my cynicism is not going to argue we're there - yet. There are problems and they're getting worse by the day, but we're still a ways off from the point of no return.
When we start seeing more Al Frankens elected, or demanding answers, then I will say there's progress and hope. Until then, we circle the drains.
