The Occupy Movement's Masturbation Rage

A few weeks ago I pointed and laughed at a genius who misspelled her lament at not being able to land a job with her expensive degree. I felt bad about it later (I actually didn't), but it turns out the young lady did not take kindly to being upbraided:

I recognize that I switched the i and the e in field. If you want to sit there and lie to yourself and say that you’ve never done that, go ahead. But I wasn’t going to go through all the trouble to take it down, rewrite the sign, re-upload it, and then still probably catch hate for people that center their lives around looking for it.

When people talk about how the younger generation has no concept of non-verbal communication, this is what they mean. Luv, if you can't take the time and effort to make sure your pedestrian rant at Teh Man doesn't make you look like a complete idiot, then you can't be surprised when people make fun of you. Because they don't know you. Because all you are to them is a piece of paper with words next to the kind of hangdog face that Sarah McLachlan uses to get donations for the ASPCA.

It's a hard cold cruel fact that I began to come to terms with about halfway through college: people judge you on first impressions, and that means appearance. It's human nature. It isn't going to change. If you're going to put your face out there in the big bad world, try not to give people a reason to throw shit at it. And if you can't be bothered, then your skin better be thicker than rhino horn, 'cause the Internet is a mean mean place.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Last night I attended a performance of Church by Young Jean Lee at Single Carrot Theater in Baltimore. Fine performance of a provocative play by a damn good troupe. I mean "provocative" in the best possible sense of that word: it provoked me to think about it's subject, that being organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. But it also gave me a wonderful phrase to hang about the Occupy Movement and its fellow-travelers: Masturbation Rage.

Everything about these clowns is a cheap facsimile of what they imagine the French Revolution was like. A bunch of people standing around waving signs and being obnoxious is not, in any meaningful sense, "occupying" anything. Sure, that's where things have to start: the Tea Party and the French Revolution began that way. But then you have to move on and organize, create a set of goals and attempt to carry them out. For the Tea Partiers, that meant expressing our distaste at our New Class overlords and using electoral muscle to hold the GOP's feet to the fire. Now, they may not succeed in that second part, but they're trying.

The Occupy Movement is a stunt. It's astroturf. It's waiting for fucking Godot to immanentize the eschaton. It's a loud pitched wail for Big Daddy White Boss to change your diaper and give you a sucker. When it ends, exactly the same players will be saying and doing exactly the same things, and the New York Stock Exchange will open and close as though nothing happened. Because nothing has. Ask this guy:

We will stack the bodies this high...

What's the difference between you and him? His maxim was that "political power comes from the barrel of a gun." When V.I. Lenin "occupied" something, that wasn't a demonstration of the possibility of occupation. It meant blood was going to flow. He didn't want the Tsar to provide jobs for the mis-educated; he wanted to kill the Tsar. Which he did.

The Occupy "movement" has legitimate complaints. Crony capitalism is a blight on a free society. The higher education industry has been shafting their customers for decades. But they can't see the extent to which they are the pawns of the institutions they claim to deplore. They have allowed themselves to be turned into useful idiots for a political class that exploits their misery to serve those same corporate and bureaucratic interests. In much the same way, Lenin exploited the suffering of the Russian people during WW1 to establish a regime that multiplied that suffering a thousand-fold.

Trying to prevent industry from corrupting government by giving government more money and authority is like trying to prevent rape with breast implants. All you're doing is making the victim more desirable.