Tuesday, December 20, 2011

What the -ites don't like (long version)

There's a substratum of the Occupy Movement that yields some very hot cultural oil. What appears to the hardcore sub/urbanite as their radical deculturization (aka hippiedom) instantly calls much of our shaky cultural superstructure into immediate question.

The -ites think: It's hard enuf for us to keep all these things going, but do those whacko hippies have to disgust & insult & impoverish us while we work hard at it? Do they have a death-wish...or something? Yes, they actually do have... Something...

Occupy actually contains a bread spectrum of people, some of whom may look superficially like hippies, but come from many classes. They have a fine/instinctive dramatic sense of getting everybody's attention fixed on where & what they want it to be concentrated on: the centers of power - state houses, city halls, big bank offices (not credit unions), corporate HQs, Wall Street - where it is & what it symbolizes. This is a intended as a profoundly educative effort; they aren't asking to be housed on their own behalves - or hasn't anybody noticed & remarked upon this yet? They aren't panhandling us, they're visually & verbally accusing & distressing the institutional players who are actually ripping us off.

The 1% (of course) want us to be distracted by appearances, charmed by the usually envied & admired rich, while being disgusted by what appears to be the undeserving poor sleeping in little mountaineering gumdrop-tents on downtown sidewalks. But what actually happens is that the more the Occupiers are abused, the deeper our subconscious sympathy runs.

Some media-hacks (Willie Brown in his last Sunday's CHRON column) scorn the Occupiers for having cellphones & not really being abjectly poor. For the record: Occupy is not a Poor People's March. It's an Informed People's deeply disturbing indictment of our warped economic situation. The more our situation warps, the more disturbing the indictment: We ask ourselves: Why, why...can't we just fix it?

Ans: Some -ites like things just the way they are. So do the plutocrats who once used to inspire & now covertly fund them. That increasingly faltering delusion's being called into question now by the Occupy Movement, right before our decreasingly unbelieving eyes.

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