Message Discipline And Its Failings

If any proof were needed that the Occupy Wall Street movement has lost the plot, it was on offer Friday afternoon in San Francisco.  Traffic ground to a halt around Union Square as a crowd of protestors – complete with signs and drums, of course – camped out in the intersection of Post and Powell, which naturally provoked a chorus of car horns and not a small bit of opprobrium from shoppers.  Meanwhile, three cops on horseback rolled their eyes, but otherwise stood there doing nothing.  So what was being protested?  There were a few signs about “BUY NOTHING” and general anti-corporatist rage, and Black Friday is certainly the right time for such as that, but is that what the Occupy movement is about now?  Because if it is, Ed Earl Brown has tuned out.

You remember Ed Earl Brown, our notional middle-American.  He’s in dire straits, he’s underemployed, the wife’s barely keeping food on the table, the house is upside down and the mortgage isn’t great.  You know why Ed Earl’s wife was at Wal-Mart at stupid o’clock Friday morning?  Because the only way to make the Christmas dollars go far enough is to head down to the annual cattle run for $200 flat screens and hope not to get trampled, tased or pepper-sprayed.  Yes, kids, it’s bloodsport on Black Friday these days.

Ed Earl has a vague sense that something is very wrong with this country, that things have gone off the rails, that it shouldn’t be this way, that the deck is somehow stacked in favor of everyone who already has money.  Ed Earl would like to see Wells Fargo get theirs, or Bank of America, or one of these other financial entities that went to Vegas for a decade, got Uncle Sam to make them whole, and promptly turned on their own customers to squeeze them until the pips are squeaking, as if Matthew 18:25-35 were never written. (Look it up, you heathens.)

But Ed Earl does not identify with a bunch of bong-watered granola-shavers getting into fights with the cops.  Ed Earl is not down for the destruction of capitalism.  And if you ask Ed Earl what the Occupy movement is about, he’s probably not going to be able to tell you other than it looks like a bunch of hippies.

This is the shortcoming of OWS.  They rejected any idea that they should have a set of demands, which is fine – but they also failed to deliver a clear, sound-bite-friendly summation of their grievances.  And spare me the complaining about sound bites; if Our Lord could deliver a summation of Christianity in twenty-five words in John 3:16, nobody else has any excuse.  Come to think of it, if every OWS-related protest was waving signs that just said “MATTHEW 18:25-35” it would make a universe of difference in terms of perception and messaging.  But how hard is it to say “the banks got bailed out and went right back to doing the same things as always”?  How hard it is to find people who got baited-and-switched on mortgages, or improperly foreclosed on by banks who were crying to Uncle Sam with their hats in their hands three years ago?  How hard is it to keep the spotlight on the shenanigans of the financial sector and how there has been no accounting for their role in tanking the economy?

But no matter, the plot is well and truly lost.  Thanks to the usual suspects and their ill-informed amen corner in the professionally indignant left (looking at you, Naomi Wolf), it’s the age old hippies vs. cops tale, and the hippies are always going to lose that one.  The only thing turning the tide are the optics of UC-Davis campus police hosing down unarmed seated kids (with tuition-paying parents) with military-grade OC spray, and naturally the apologists of Fox are comparing it to a condiment. As opposed to contemplating the idea that local governments have militarized their police departments in the name of a “war on crime/drugs/whatever” that would give any actual anti-government true believer the screaming purple fits.  I mean, if you really do fear your government, wouldn’t you be a little concerned that the old-school revolver and billy club have been replaced with tasers AND pepper spray AND metal batons AND semiauto pistols with multiple magazines and over fifty rounds of ammo AND carbines or even submachine guns in the trunk of the car?  The pant-shitting militia types never seem to be bent out of shape over the fact that the local cop on the beat has a bigger and broader array of firepower than any workaday federal agent.

Long story short: the infinite distractability of the American public continues to act in the service of the 1%.  Anyone can tell you what’s wrong with this country, but nobody can focus long enough to do something about it.

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