Whitherburo: superb analysis of Occupy, quite literally in a class of its own, for various reasons

[stockholmer]

http://whitherburo.wordpress.com/

By Way of Introduction


“Thus in the midst of their greatest festivities, though physically thronging together, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. . . Hence peoples who have reached this point of premeditated malice, when they receive this last remedy of providence and are thereby stunned and brutalized, are sensible no longer of comforts, delicacies, pleasures and pomp, but only of the sheer necessities of life. And the few survivors in the midst of an abundance of things necessary for life naturally become sociable, and, returning to the primitive simplicity of the first world of peoples, are again religious, truthful and faithful.”

-Vico, Scienza Nuova

Preface


1. It comes to pass, at last: this great Leviathan that has swallowed the whole world, now commences its death agony. The mechanical man likened unto the perfected State, with unweeping eyes and unfeeling heart, rusts from its own internal emptiness. The clockwork society breaks down. And the returning ghost towns, like a forgotten malediction, return to gaze mournfully at the passing of the glory of the world. The suburbs, this great gilded prison, agonize as they are left to return to nature, to slowly decay in their false-seeming gentility. The streetlights no longer illuminate the night on the edge of town, but cede way to their precursors, of which they are only the sad imitation, the moon and stars. The roads crumble into gravel, and from thence return to dust that they always were. Like unto like, America “is the nothingness that reduces itself to nothingness”, in the words of Hegel. Such are the heart-rending times the Americans inhabit.

This was the scenic backdrop of Occupy, which was not the beginning of anything new for America, as so many vulgar mediocrities would have us believe, but the faded repetition of its threadbare paltry ideals, and in truth, the pageant of the death agony of the American citizenry. The body politic will not revive: it is a corpse already beginning to putrefy. Who wants to be a part of death? There were those, with their prefabricated void collapsing of its own nullity, who wanted at all costs to stop this historically unprecedented implosion. They complained about rebuilding bridges, redistributing this or that. But look how intolerant their tolerance was: these liberals were openly working with the cops. Look how their spirits have so collapsed, these masterless slaves hate anyone acting manfully against the shameful degradation called American normality. And look how foolish these so-called educated are, who still believe they live in a democracy even while the police are throwing tear gas into their right to assembly, even while their beloved half-black puppet is currently giving the police the legal right to kill anyone. It is no great secret that America is terminally ill: it is clearly already braindead, its ever-feeble heart reduced to an automata of life support machines. One day, the de facto wards of this inhuman vegetable, the bankers and the military-industrial complex, will decide to pull the plug.

Before this predictable ignominious end, there was a message of hope, but not for the Stars and Stripes. The Occupy tents appeared in the heart of the grey steel cities, looking to the careful observer like a thousand Indian tipis had returned to the land they loved so dearly, exactly as they promised to do not so long ago. It had changed so much for the worse, but they still knew it as their own. It was as if they came back when Detroit and its productive apparatus lay shattered on the ground, when green shoots came into the crumbling brick and concrete buildings. When the long awaited wreck and ruin spoken of in the Ghost Dance was becoming so clear. When America was drowning in all the blood of the innocent it had spilled, and choking to death on all its ill-gotten plunder. The Indian spirits were completing their invisible revolution.

snip

[xchrom]

1. Hmmmmm... Interesting. Nt

[patrice]

2. Perhaps this is about an Occupy other than the one I met, which was paralyzed by meth addled

Last edited Sat Aug 4, 2012, 09:19 PM - Edit history (1)

Paulites who successfully promoted paranoid power-struggles and blocked just about anything and everything that wasn't an opportunity to go head-to-head with cops, but, then, for some reason, never managed to put anything together for themselves to go get their heads bashed, so that they could go home and brag to their suburban middle-class fan clubs about how they are on the front lines for the legalization of cannabis, and brag about their new-found love for "anarchy", which they proudly displayed by not picking up even one of the several thousands of fractionally consumed bottled waters that they used, and you can bet they failed to mention to their cupcake land buddies how they were following a rich guy with a criminal record of assault against women, because he was their leader since he put together campaigns against police stops for drunk-driver tests, and all the while everything in the camp that wasn't nailed down or locked up being stolen the whole time and "occupiers" panhandling for cigarette money.

We all tried to work it out and marched a lot, several hundreds of us, several times, even IN the streets against our permits, with cops watching. We did street theater and chanting and drums, but it was never enough for some people because they weren't the sole ones making the decisions THEIR way and they gossiped and back-stabbed anyone but one of theirs who tried to lead so . . .

It's over now and I'm glad of it.

[lunatica]

3. I still believe the idea has it's time right now

Trying to quit such an entrenched structure as our American society isn't something that will ever be done easily. There probably needs to be more destruction from within. Rome didn't cease to exist overnight, but it did cease to exist.

[patrice]

5. I think it all has to begin with everyone being completely up front about their differences.

We never did that, but the differences also never went away, no one surrendered them, so the sub-surface stuff just got worse and worse.

You have to either get the horizontal processing REALLY right (the way I saw the Chicago Occupy do it when all of us visited Occupy St. Louis for about a week), you must get that horizontal processing really working well, not just doing it pro forma, which is worse, I think, than not doing it at all, or you have to come to somekind of temporary accommodation of leaders. Our group couldn't/wouldn't do either.

[stockholmer]

4. I find that this is addressed here:

But now there is a chance for building new buildings, for loving new lovers, for filling old emptiness, to end the wandering. In sum, Occupy, for the 1% of those who wanted to radicalize it, centers on resurrecting the counter-culture, with its urban space and its rural space, where anyone with a free heart could move like a fish in the sea. Now we, gasping fish dying of the outside world, have to cobble together our own new sea. Without the silliness, the drugs, the mysticism, the apathy. And this time, to last. Neither to rot in isolation nor to get lost in the normality of the American way of life after a rebellious youth. To escape from the life of student and barista, homeless and stay-at-home. Too many are rotting in the basements of their parental homes or at school. Provide the means for massive societal defection and it will surely come to pass-this is Grogan’s great lesson! In our lonely age of concrete, the guerrillas have to become farmers of the spirit, to plant the forest in which they will move.

[patrice]

6. We were doing some very good work on Occupy Our Homes. I felt very encouraged by that and we could

pick that work back up at an appropriate time.

I think Occupy Our Homes is some of the best work there is, because I have been saying it for a very long time, ever since I taught high school way back when: there's a whole lot of potential solutions in moving in together and defining functional co-operative. There's an enormous amount of derelict property in our cities that could be saved this way. I still hope to see a serious effort to get that right and I think this is a doable thing.