The Occupy! people seem to be disillusioned, not cynical. Cynical people are like me - - we sit on our ass, pick out all the flaws in the system and do jack-shit to fix the situation except bitch about it when the spirit moves.
Occupy Wall Street! seems to recognize that the system, however well it may have worked in the distant past, is kaputt. FUBAR. They know it can't be fixed and so they are not bothering to try to fix it in the traditional ways - - i.e., offering themselves as "change" candidates or going out and busting their ass for whoever promises hope and change. Been there, done that. Fool me once . . . etc. What they are saying is, the system can't be fixed, we need a new one. And in the general assemblies (the models for which came from Madrid and Athens, but which show echoes of the Columbia Strike and the Parisian Days of May of 1968 and even earlier models - - the workers' and peasants' soviets of 1917) they are engaged in a democratic, deliberative process to try to determine the way forward. This may take some time.
I think these guys have seen some truths that the general American public is slow to realize - - that not only is the system fucked, but it has passed the point of no return. In other words, the same special interests that have corrupted (bought and paid for) both political parties and their leading candidates have also succeeded over a thirty-year period in abolishing the legal restrictions (including anti-trust legislation) on media consolidation (the landmark moment there being IMHO when the prohibitions were removed that prevented a newspaper from owning a TV station and vice versa) and have been so successful in their endeavours that - - as Chris Hedges pointed out in one of his interviews - - there are about six corporations now that control almost everything that reaches the eyes and ears of the average American citizen. IMHO, the corporations that own the media )and more importantly, their own corporate owners) may or may not actually set the national agenda, but they sure as hell vet the access of those who want to. The result is a stranglehold on national debate, wherein some subjects are taboo, some candidates or commentators are persona non grata and in general the national agenda is set within a certain very narrow set of permitted parameters. Since the same corporate interests that control the media now also have the leglislature (both houses) firmly in their pockets, nothing is going to change within the system as it now is.
I think the demonstrators are very far from cynical. By their very presence on the streets, they are indicating that they believe the system CAN change for the better, even though they don't know yet HOW it can change. This is what's under debate in the hundreds of general assemblies across the nation as we speak. Interesting that they expect no meaningful debate to be possible in Congress, which I think it's fair to say they have given up on, so they are going out and organizing the debate themselves. That somehow struck me as very American. Not George Bush American or Obama American but real American, something I haven't seen in a long, long time.
Personally, I think the movement, unfortunately, will fail. It will fail in any one of the ways that I have gone through in my prior posts. But that's because I'm a cynic. I'm a bitter, cynical old man. I've seen it all. It all doesn't have to end the way I think it will end. (But of course it will.) The people in the streets are great people - - truly America's best. But America has a habit of crushing out its best, beating them down to make room for its worst, and whatever past successes reformist movements have had, I think the walls have narrowed so much on them in the past thirty or forty years that it's now practically impossible for them to make any headway. This movement, for all its promise, will peter out in the end.
