[lbo-talk] Folly Square -- well, no, not REALLY

[Michael Smith]

I've been pondering my mixed feelings about last night's OWS event at
Foley Square. Might as well confess that I was a little disappointed
that the crowd was so well-behaved. I'm deeply convinced that no real
social change ever happens without some lawbreaking, and that stopping
traffic is the very least you can do. But last night, a crowd of
30,000 people -- by some accounts -- allowed themselves to be squeezed
onto the sidewalk, so louts in SUVs could continue to drive down
Centre Street. Business as usual: a very important symbolic point. 

Unfortunately, there seems to be a connection here to the union
contingents. It's wonderful that the unions have come to the party, of
course. But they really seemed to be in charge last night, and their
recent history -- I mean in the last half-century or so -- and
institutional culture are anything but insurrectionary. 

Full disclosure: It creeped me out to see all these SEIU types wearing
T-shirts with the word 'MARSHALL' [sic] printed on them in big letters.
And at the narrowest point of the Centre Street sidewalk bottleneck,
in front of the municipal building, one saw an extraordinary
spectacle: a double line of these 'marshalls' lined up *in front*
of the police cordon, and facing, like them, *toward* the
crowd -- rather than toward the enemy. Have I made the picture clear?
It was like the 'marshalls' were the first line of defense against the
crowd, and the cops were the second. I thought then, and still think,
that there's something very wrong with this picture. 

During the tense ten minutes or so when barricades were getting kicked
over and the pigs were sweating big greasy smelly beads of coward
sweat, there was a young chap -- not a union guy, I think; looked just
like a regular mid-20s Occupier -- who did a 'people's mic' thing and
tried to calm all us hotheads down. I can't reproduce his exact words,
but what it came down to was that the right-wing media -- which is to
say, all the media -- would have a field day if we got out of line.  

The kids are all right. But all of us, of course, are still dragging
around various selections of mind-forg'd manacles. Among them, the
fetish of law-abidingness, and the fear of backlash and bad press, are
surely among the most burdensome. 

But I don't want to turn into some kind of Jacobin-magazine
alter-kaker, so let me end on a pleasanter note: 

 
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/interview-with-the-occupy-wall.html

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Michael J. Smith
mjs at smithbowen.net

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
http://www.cars-suck.org
http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com

Any proposition that seems self-evident 
is almost certainly false.