OCCUPY THE WHITE HOUSE
OR THE MEN’S ROOM
OCTOBER 12, 2011. So far the Occupy events have managed to obscure and delay—or remain ignorant of—their precise agenda(s). This is taken as a sign of rank stupidity, but it may hold promise because, let’s face it, as soon as you state your political objectives these days, you’re pretty much finished. You trigger the opposition forces and you attract supporters, and then the whole thing eventually winds up in a muddy ditch, a car without traction…
But if you obfuscate and hint and suggest and garble, while others interpret what you mean, you can play the media like a drum and short-circuit many brains and cause smoke to exit many ears.
Yesterday, in New York, two guys in suits showed up at the rally with a sign that announced: WE ARE THE 1%. They intimated they were investment bankers. Police decided to keep them separate from the 99%, for fear of a clash.
Were these two guys actors? Were they really part of the protesters?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6YDA52gkpg&w=480&h=274]
Now, I know these “occupations” could descend into violence, and if they do, there is a chance it will be provoked from the outside, to serve somebody’s political plot…but if that can be avoided, we have a chance to see something interesting develop.
Wall St., big government, thieving venal corporations, recent college grads with heavy debts from student loans and no job prospects, unions, Obama operatives, the poor on welfare, small businesses wound up in bureaucratic red tape imposed by the government—none of them or their supporters are going to get what they want from showing up in the streets in various cities with signs. It’s not going to happen. This is not an A to B revolution. It isn’t a new political party. It isn’t a pressure group leaning on Congress.
It’s a glob.
That can be a good thing if the glob expands asymmetrically.
Media will see what they want to see and report on it, and the reporting will change from day to day. Against this backdrop of serious high-IQ idiots trying to analyze what is going on, we could get some real theater.
We need it. Politics has become so predictable, on all sides, so automatic, that you really need to be an android to hope to move up the food chain.
Government has become such a fungal organism its main ambition is to expand. It doesn’t really care what it does, as long as the doing of it creates more jobs for its own employees. If it could get away with the invention of a new cabinet post called Toilet Maintenance, it would bring it into existence and appoint 10,000 inspectors in the blink of an eye.
Against this kind of absurdity, we need a counter. Apparently, appealing to rational instincts doesn’t work anymore. The fungus needs to ooze up to something it doesn’t understand, something that doesn’t add up.
The fungus perceives people as ciphers that can be encircled and swallowed. But if the ciphers starting acting like a previously unknown species, the fungus, in its small brain, will try to re-set and re-categorize the situation and assess the novelty. This it cannot do.
I would hope that, after Occupy Wall Street, we would get an Occupy the White House, or Occupy CBS. I myself favor Occupy the Sun…but I tend to take things too far too soon.
Perhaps Occupy Tesla would work. The idea being it’s time to unseal and recapture his notes on new energy devices the FBI seized upon his death.
Or, less ambitiously, how about 5000 people in the Wall Street area emitting a low droning sound for an hour at lunchtime?
“I don’t know, Dan. I’m standing here watching something very weird. One of the leaders told me a few minutes ago, before the chanting started, that the group was about to employ a non-violent strategy Mahatma Gandhi used in India to ‘just say no to the British occupiers.’ Those were his words. So far, no one we’ve checked with can recall Gandhi doing this. Back to you in the studio.”
The government fungus pauses. The media fungus pauses.
Outside the offices of Goldman Sachs, at midnight, 20 fat guys wearing suits and holding large dogs on leashes show up and take turns reading aloud from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
Within a half hour, three media vans arrive and bathe the street with thick blue light, workers set up their equipment and start making coffee.
At a nearby hospital, an exhausted intern on extended duty, sitting in a little alcove off a corridor, is watching the fat guys read on a small portable TV. He hears approaching footsteps. He stands up, walks into the corridor. A dozen people wearing white coats march up to him. The woman in the lead says, “We understand the pharmacy refuses to stock calcium and magnesium. The President is on his way. He just suffered another episode. He needs supplementation. We’re occupying the hospital. Where’s the Director?”
Without waiting for an answer, the group moves away.
The intern goes back to the alcove, rubbing his eyes, trying to shake the sleep out of his head. He glances at the TV. Now the scene is Battery Park. Three men in bathing trunks are reciting the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”
The news broadcast cuts away to a rooftop in Brooklyn, where a young man draped in a blanket reads from Tropic of Cancer: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”
The intern looks down at his hands to see whether he’s dreaming.
“I don’t know, Dan. Across the city tonight, people are doing strange things. Are they one group? Are smaller factions springing up? It’s hard to say. A colleague of mine who was just here said she spoke to a Congressional source who said this whole Occupy phenomenon is really a move by Chinese allies of Belgian bankers seeking to devalue the dollar. That’s a rumor, of course, but right now all we seem to have are rumors. An intern from University Hospital stopped by—he’s a Yale graduate—and he said he believes what we’re witnessing is the cumulative effect of several decades of widespread use of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. A contagion of antidepressants, if you will…”
Soon, across the East River, the first glimmer of dawn appears. What will the new day bring?
A hologram of an ox goring a building? A few unemployed software designers posing as reporters interviewing rallying students? A lookalike Michael Bloomberg throwing counterfeit stock certificates out of a slow-moving limo? A man wearing a judge’s robe lounging in a deck chair on the sidewalk, feeding drinks to a bikini-clad blond?
Possible cops lead possible stock brokers out of the Goldman Sachs building in handcuffs, as the brokers exclaim, “Our company donated one-point-three million to Obama!”
Oh…there is one little thing I forgot to mention. All this engrossing theater, all these stimulating possibilities rest on the prior assumption that people can understand their own freedom, can understand that, in the long run, government will not save them from themselves.
Or to put it another way, just because Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would, in today’s world, be camping out in the Wall Street area, it doesn’t mean the people camping out there now are Jeffersons and Madisons.
Jon Rappoport