The Failure of Political Incoherency in OWS

As much as I would like to let Occupy Wall Street embrace the slow, somewhat agonizing death it deserves without more disturbance or attention, I did feel it relevant to counter one particular political philosophy that seemed embedded within the movement: that impulsive desire for "non-binding consensus based collective decision making" (in the words of OccupyWallSt.org). This attractive methodology for enacting whatever form of change the demonstrators hoped for may prove alluring to the quasi-enlightened mind, yet in terms of legislative productivity, it is utterly bankrupt.


The most credible attempt at defending this lack of cohesion is an attempt to connect the "occupiers" with the protests that occurred in the name of the Civil Rights movement and later withdrawing our armed forces from Vietnam. These movements, it is argued, did not have any strong, specific policy proposal or platform, yet achieved a dramatic level of change within their day merely by citing a given flaw in the status quo, which is ultimately how the Occupy protests have been framed. 


Two glaring flaws open up in this argument. First, for all its bluster, the momentum garnered by the various sites of occupation is exceedingly small in comparison with its alleged predecessors. Granted, the widespread and global nature of the protests is a bit of a novelty, but at any given time the actual numbers of such gatherings rarely top over a few thousand, with the most exaggerated claims coming from Oakland, California, where one protestor was cited as believing up to 30,000 people being in attendance (although police estimates were nearly a tenth of that number). Contrast this with the 200,000 minimum estimates for, say, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington, or protests from 1967 through 1973 against Vietnam, many of which topped the hundred thousand mark or verged on a million in participance. Polling for the movement, with questionable accuracy, has at best ascertained a massive indifference towards the protestors, with majorities of respondents more often than not remaining neutral on the subject. The fact is that the nation's workforce is simply not about to go on a coordinated strike nor will our students ditch en masse over the cries of the protestors, however legitimate one finds their message to be. 


My second point is that the process by which the occupiers could hope to create change, even with a massive base of popular support, is far more murky and prone to failure than any other successful grassroots protest they attempt to emulate. Whereas massive pressure on the federal government could and did change institutionalized forms of racial inequality and led to the withdrawal from Vietnam, one cannot directly apply democratic accountability towards Wall Street. You can't vote out the 1% in the next election cycle so you have to resort to regulatory action on the part of the government in order to accomplish anything. This disconnect between the target of the occupiers' ire and the actual agents of change that could be of assistance is only exacerbated by the fact that they claim no endorsement of any politician or policy proposal. For all the cover ambiguity might give, it allows those individuals who do make up the movement to return to their local ballot boxes come election day willing to punish a fat cat or two but not certain of how to do it. 


Yet success aside, this presents the hidden danger of the co-option such an organic, fluid movement was designed to prevent against in the first place. As much as they might not wish it, there will be a list of candidates to choose from in November 2012, and if the Occupy movement proves as decisively relevant as its believers would like, it isn't much of a stretch of the imagination to see politicians running under the OWS banner, grafting their personal agenda onto juicy rhetoric all too easily spun as fitting within such parameters. Only when an agenda is made public, with the potential for needed scrutiny and evaluation, does it become relevant and hopefully feasible to enact.


Perhaps this is what the protestors feared all along. Indeed, as the Obamacare debates proved, hiding behind a mound of ink that can be rushed in on a whim can be a winning strategy as opposed to legitimate deliberation. In my personal experience of policy debate, it's hard to lose if you are a moving target and don't defend anything specific. "What, you're challenging that? No, no. What I really meant was..."


And so it goes on. I'm intrigued to see how the last fading moments of the movement are spent, specifically given the emerging situation with OccupyLA and questions of those eviction notices. Will the fuss about Wall Street go away? Of course not. But to think it started with OWS is an even sillier supposition. The gridlock on Capitol Hill, worthy of blame on both sides, will not be parted like the Red Sea when a city council or two extends the eviction date on their respective Occupy camps. Hopefully the American people are beginning to catch on that we need policy focus, not impotence, in order to right the legitimate abuses that have been done to our system.

Those Silly, Simple Joys of Life

It seems like forever since I was able to sit down and have some quiet time in which to write. The few moments I considered in the past just didn't seem to present me with what I considered sufficient subject material, particularly given my pledge to stay positive in every other post I get through. For the longest time, I struggled with the belief that I couldn't come up with something worth writing about. That maybe my sense of optimism was misplaced, and that I might as well jump on the bandwagon of cynicism, given how much easier it is for one operating under such a framework to churn out seemingly endless amounts of text to perhaps an even larger body of dissatisfied people.

Well, salvation came (as it always seems to do) from the most unlikely of sources: a simple, white stain of paint on my jeans. To put a bit more context to my story, I should point out that today was one of the "set construction" days of my local theatrical production, which left me not exactly spotless after I had helped get primer onto several of our major set pieces. So as I began to type this evening, I found myself continually glancing down at my stained, dirty pants. Not exactly the most enlightening scenario, I agree. Yet this visual manifestation seemed to be trying to teach me something beyond just the obvious "take better care not to spill the paint next time, you idiot." After a few moments of reflection, it dawned on me that stains, like any other mark, can be just as much of a signifier of one's work as it is their particular failure.

Another analogy might be useful. In one of my favorite movies of all time, The Great Race, Tony Curtis' part of the Great Leslie, a masterful stuntman, driver, and womanizer, stands out with his particularly clean white clothes, which seem to dodge every potential mess they might come in contact with. Yet in the end, when he actually gets into the thick of the action in the classic pie fight scene, he emerges covered head to toe in pastry filling. Not only does it deserve a laugh or two, but it shows a level of personality that the normally aloof Leslie seemed to be lacking throughout the film. Now that he has fallen in love with the main girl and has something more to fight for than simple glory, he can't but help take a pie to the face.

As silly as it may seem, it is really these simple joys of coming out of a hard days work with a few stains to show for it that make life a bit brighter. If we never had to worry about the aches and pains of daily life, I'd feel more than a bit bored myself. I'm not asking that we all go out and become workaholics. Quite the opposite. I just feel that in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, it'd be nice to take the time to look down at the scuffs on your shoes, the stains on your shirts, not as a measure of your cleanliness but as a reminder of the finite, limited, imperfect, yet wonderful world we live in. A world that, when you truly engage it, will have its shares of scratches and aches, but which subsequently is all the more exciting to truly live in.

Love Labour's Lost

For all my somewhat-inflated love of the arts, I cannot claim to always understand or accurately comment on the politics that dominates Hollywood and its associated web of intrigue. Yet for the love of God, my stomach was so sickened by the news that our beloved heroine, the very Kim Kardashian herself, has so hastily snipped the sacred bond of marriage, that I was compelled to say a few words on the matter. Yet I was not the first to notice this lovely piece of news, and so Ms. Kardashian has evidently given a response to her fans concerning the break-up. Here is a brief snippet of the garbage I allowed my screen to be temporarily defamed by (courtesy of SeattlePi):

"When I probably should have ended my relationship, I didn't know how to and I didn't want to disappoint a lot of people," she writes.

"I want a family and babies and a real life so badly that maybe I rushed into something too soon," she says.

The sheer immaturity of these statements is unbelievable, but immature they are. Most striking is the absurd rationale behind Ms. Kardashian's decisions, an indication of her broader priorities. First on this unbalanced list is the not wanting "to disappoint a lot of people," aka I'm a slave to societal demand, even to the point of determining my partner for life. I could continue bashing this pathetic opinion schema yet why do so when, in all honesty, such decision calculus is not at all uncommon in our culture. Open a feminine magazine and peruse for a few moments—it shouldn't be all that difficult to understand the extent to which the self-worth of our women is dictated by popular opinion and the attention they garner from adhering to such opinion.


Yet the will of her fans was not the sole factor in her short span of marriage. No, Ms. Kardashian, like any level-headed woman, wants "a family and babies and a real life so badly." Being the grammar Nazi that I am, I just had to say the use of conjunctions was a bit disgusting.  That aside, there is also the implicit acknowledgement here that her life, at least outside of marriage, isn't exactly "real." At least on this yours truly concurs. Beyond my analysis of the substance (or lack thereof) as presented by Ms. Kardashian, I am thoroughly stunned by this awful contortion of family life. True, in many cases, the couple's relationship seems to selfishly crowd out the equally relevant role of procreation. Ms. Kardashian, on the other hand, goes off the other deep end, implicitly placing her ex-husband on the bottom of the considerations that went into her tying the knot. Not that Mr. Humphries is himself dying from neglect, but any compounding selfishness doesn't make the debacle any better. This urge towards a "real life" also serves to equate the maternal instinct to a time-sensitive compulsion, a "phase," that doesn't do justice to the numerous sacrifices mothers make, even on those occasions in which they don't desire to "so badly" do so.


Whew. As fun as this post has been to write, the subject matter is just too outrageous for me to contribute any further to the god-like status of Ms. Kardashian. The bottom line is that Ms. Kardashian has her life rather out of tune, and its better she let her failures die quietly rather than use them as another excuse to satiate her hunger for attention. Hopefully this abysmal situation is enough to wake up her fellow hedonists to the reality of their sad existence.