THE OCCUPATION OF WALL STREET
(10/11. This is the first of a 2 part
series, including the next essay, “The History of Capitalism”)
Many Americans
have an exaggerated notion as to the trend setting nature of their culture. The
quantity of innovative creation not germinated on the western side of the
Atlantic would surprise the average American, including,
surprisingly enough, many media concepts. My first brush with this kind of
thing occurred about 25 years ago during my marriage to an English woman (see
essay, “Scary Economic Stuff:
England
”).
During one of our visits to her family, I was introduced to a brilliant
television series where the star, one Alf Garnett, a thespian of genius
quality, played a crusty old working class man who regularly ranted against the
“poofs”, the blacks, the “Packies”
and such, that is, the modern England morphing into the dynamic multi-racial,
multi-ethnic place it is today. It was enlightening to learn that the wonderful
American series, “All in the Family”, with Archie, Edith and “Meathead”, was
directly plagiarized from it. The same can be said for what we now call
“reality TV”, which was up and running in Europe long before the first “Big
Brother” appeared in
America
.
In fact, a series with the exact same name (Hermano Grande) was degrading humanity in
Spain
years before the debut of
such programming in the U.S. Guess what? All those Simon
Brown, let’s-mercilessly-humilliate-a-stooge-paid-to-be-humilliated shows, originated in
Europe. American
Idol and such are just conceptual refried beans. Guess what? The Europeans were
using cell phone technology to do things Americans hadn’t even imagined at the
time. The Finns (Nokia) were buying things from vending machines with their
“cells” while Americans sat with their fingers up their asses thinking how cool
they were.
As the American
socio-political reality has moved further and further to the right, like
termites slowly compromising the structural integrity of a house that still
looks good, the American presence in the vanguard of innovation is slowly
weakening. Anyone traveling abroad in a developed country cannot help but be
impressed with the infra-structural creativity of roads, bridges and urban
renewal in general. The development of high speed and more conventional public
transport can open an objective American’s eye to the possibility of such. I
suggest a perusal of some of
Europe’s newer
sporting venues, primarily soccer stadiums, to see arquitecture in the ‘avant garde’. With the exception of Jerry Jones’ extravagant
creation for his Dallas Cowboys, the rest of the new stadiums scattered about American
football are predictably oversized bowls of poured concrete lacking any
personality beyond poured concrete. While the rest of the world has rolled up
its sleeves in an attempt to “de-fossilize” their economies,
America
’s
political drift to the right perpetuates the dominance of petroleum interests
that fund a political system way too dependent on the money only they can
provide.
As one who spends
a good part of every year in
Spain
,
I feel qualified to say the following: the right wing movement in the
United States
, embodied in the “Tea Party”
movement and most personified in people like Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Michelle
Bachmann, Rick Santorum and others, is greatly reminiscent of Franco’s
Spain
. It is a
movement deeply rooted in archaic religious dogma. It is narrow minded, rural,
anti-intellectual. Rather than respecting sophisticated knowledge and learning,
it is suspicious of it, probably due to the insecurity of its own educational
shortcomings. This was how Franco’s
Spain
operated and any of those
listed above would have reveled in it.
Spain
strangled
in that socio-political reality for 40 years. It slept there. It languished
there. It was about as far away from any trend setting developments a developed
country could be. Is that where we as Americans want to go?
Although “better
late than never” is a welcome concept in this case, the “occupy
Wall St.”
demonstrations have also begun in a bit of a time warp. Manifestations with
exactly the same personality began appearing in
Europe
at least 6 months ago, but on a bigger scale. I was in
Spain
in May
when a broad based movement known as “Los Indignados”
(the indignants) took to the streets directly after
municipal elections all over the country. Crowds running into the tens of
thousands took over the commercial center of
Madrid for weeks (concentrated at the Puerta del Sol), manifesting their
discontent with the country’s political class and power brokers in general. Their
main grievance was how the political process seemed to ignore their needs. These
displays of popular discontent soon spread to all of
Spain
’s big cities, and although
the crowds have been mostly peaceful, there were some moments worth mentioning.
On the day the first session of
Catalonia’s
new parliament was supposed to convene in
Barcelona,
a crowd of 30,000 or so surrounded the building and would not let the
politicians in. Some tried to sneak in the back door, some VIP elements arrived
in helicopters or with police escorts and some were simple driven off or
splattered with eggs. In the end, the opening of parliament had to be put off
for awhile. Similar things happened all over
Europe.
At the time, I
remember asking myself if my compatriots were getting any whiff of these
happenings. When I got home in July, it did not surprise me that almost none of
this had dented the American consciousness. This seems to be standard procedure
for American Big Media. The huge manifestations in
London
in early summer protesting cuts in education and the raising of tuition rates,
along with attacks to other Social Contract accoutrements, were grossly
underplayed in
America
.
This quasi-blackout was briefly lifted when Prince Charles and Camilla, on the
way to the theater in their limo, blundered into an area of unrest where their
car was pelted with eggs. This was too juicy a visual for American Big Media to
pass up, but the social unrest behind it was barely brushed upon. The same
“trickle down” coverage could be applied to how American Big Media covered the
massive anti-Iraq war demonstrations that took place all over the world at that
time. As mentioned in the essay “The News”, the emaciated coverage of New
Yorkers protesting in the streets during the 2004 Republican convention, where
endless hours of uneventful convention routine displaced demonstrations of up
to a million people on our screens, show a similar attempt to shape
“information” in the image of whoever can do so.
I was in
New York when the
“occupation of Wall Street” began. True, I was more interested in enjoying my
visit with my family than in delving into the great issues of our times, but,
whether I sought it or not, a certain level of mainstream information could not
be avoided. I’d say at least 3 days went by before this level of information,
which is the level most people operate on, began to dignify the event with a
cursory amount of news time. When it began to get too large to ignore, an
undercurrent of indigestion could always be detected in the coverage --- a kind
of smirkish, boys will be boys attempt to wrest importance from the
manifestations. When the unions decided to join in and the crowds began to
swell to lead story sizes (this is a significant happening, one where the usual
discomfort of labor with the more middle class personality of the college
educated, seems to have been bridged in what could turn out to be a powerful
coalition), a local newscast in New York covered it like this: although the
“Occupy Wall Street” event was the lead story of the newscast, there was only one
reporter who gave his soliloquy on the happenings for about 2 minutes --- no
interviews, no human interest, no further footage of the whirlwind around him,
thanks you Bob for that report. The next story dwelled upon a helicopter crash
that had occurred 2 days before in the
East River
where 2 people had died. This story came complete with a reporter on the scene,
footage of the two day old helicopter wreckage, interviews with National Transportation
Safety Board officials, experts expounding, eye witnesses witnessing, diagrams
of updrafts and downdrafts, on and on, zzzzzz --- In
other words, this news organization (I do believe it was a local ABC-Disney
affiliate) devoted more time, energy and expense to the unfortunate deaths of 2
anonymous people none of us will ever give a second thought to, than to the
universal ideological events that could affect us all going on just a mile or
so to the south.
This should not
surprise anyone. I coined the phrase the “Military-Industrial-Media Complex” in
the long essay, “9/11”. “Media” is one of the three pillars of a conspiracy
that manages and most profits from the current form of neo-liberal capitalism.
Big Media is an obese cash cow in this socio-economic scheme. It is a glutton
at its trough of wealth. Its basic, daily narrative glorifies the consumer
society and persuades us to live by and worship its incentives --- this is what
you want, this is what you need, listen to us, this is your happiness.
Although Big
Media not only allows, but, for theatrical reasons in the dog and pony show of
democracy, perpetrates a measured degree of grumbling and complaining at the
edges of it all, they are not interested in any paradigm-like shifts in the
socio-economic system’s tectonic plates. Basically, they like things just the
way they are. Tens of thousands of people occupying Wall Street and beyond was
not on their agenda. It wasn’t part of the narrative. It took them by surprise.
They don’t like surprises.
In the next
essay, “The History of Capitalism”, I will try to give some focus to the energy
source that has developed with these demonstrations, an energy source that, at
the moment, seems more instinctive than ideological. Sooner or later this
movement will have to better explain itself, and that is what I will try to do
in the next essay.
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