Gotta admit I admire Mr. Charles P. Pierce’s May Day commemoration:
There is a strong feeling, and not merely on the right or from our gloriously apathetic Center, that the Occupy people have had their time on the stage, that it is time for another show to begin. Nobody’s ready for a remix. Nobody’s ready for a reboot. (Me? I’m still trying to figure out why in hell they’re bringing back Dallas.) And nobody, certainly, is prepared to admit that what started in Zuccotti Park and a hundred other places might have permanently affected the way Americans looked at the connections between how the country does its business and how the country runs its government.
Just this morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature about how the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the activities of the lawyers who worked for the assorted shark tanks that ran the world economy into the ditch… [W]hat it does is illustrate, again, what an utterly corrupt nation the United States of America was in the first decade of the 21st century. The governing elites, all of them, were complicit in massive fraud against the rest of us. Either they participated in it, which would be the bankers and (it appears) their lawyers, or they condoned and celebrated it, which would be the financial press and the elite media, or they shirked their duty to protect the political commonwealth from being hijacked, which would be the members of both parties in the government, and us, for letting so much of the country run on automatic pilot for so long.
This was a banana republic. It was a failed state in everything except the fact that no tanks rolled in the streets. The terrorists were not hiding in Waziristan. They were having lunch at Cipriani’s and sitting in luxury boxes at the Meadowlands. The government existed only to increase their profits and to provide a quasi-legal context for organized piracy. There was an extraordinary contempt for the law, for the institutions of government, and for the people the law and those institutions were supposed to serve. The country was cored out. It was a shell of a country and a shell corporation, and it has not recovered yet…
If the Occupy people want to march, I say let them march. If they resist conventional politics, that may be because conventional politics are worth resisting. What I do know is that, if i weren’t for the people in the streets last autumn, the Obama people would be running a very different campaign and Willard Romney wouldn’t look half as ridiculous as he does. Somebody has to care enough not to care.
I like his taste in music, too. As always, YMMV.
Apart from that… anybody want to share the story of their day?