Believe me, I'm aware of how misguided the drum-circle element within the movement is. I'm well aware of how destructive it is wherever it has appeared around the world. I'm keenly aware of the Communist and anarchist orchestration of it.
Every time I read about it or even think about it, though, it just makes me wince. It makes me embarrassed for my species. As J.R. Dunn at The American Thinker puts it, "They [the OWS foot soldiers] are the third wave of the transcendental slob movements, behind the hippies and the grunge kids." And it doesn't take particularly keen powers of observation to see that with every wave, there has been a dumbing-down and coarsening that has left little room for anything resembling basic dignity. At least the hippies aspired to somekind of literary and musical sophistication, with their interest in Romantic poetry, Indian music and the like. It took a while for that wave to devolve. The OWS kids came right out of the gate as feral animals.
I cringe because it is the overall culture in which we all maneuver that produced them. Their demands, as incoherent as they are, are rooted in an insistence that the comfort and convenience in which they grew and came of age be guaranteed in perpetuity. They were raised on the television, cinema, fast food, sex education, lame pseudo-spirituality, and rock and roll that we as a society bottle-fed them.
To what extent is OWS a force to contend with? I think we can safely say they aren't interested in forming factions or caucuses within either of our major political parties. They won't be fielding any slates of candidates for anything. They won't be starting any cultural trends. In fact, all they represent on the cultural level is the last tired vestiges of the transcendental-slob-ism to which Dunn refers. They are what's left after every possibility of anything esoteric or subtle has been drained from the basic stringy-haired impulse.
As I have said before when I have written about them, the genuinely disturbing aspect of OWS is its wantonness. In that sense, the OWSers are heirs of something even more universal that has been metastasizing over the last few decades. They are of a piece with those who destroyed Watts and Detroit in the mid-1960s, the Iranian "students" who took over the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, the rioters that set whole Parisian neighborhoods ablaze over the past few years, the Islamists who we can now see were the guiding force behind the Arab spring, the Greek rioters who will not tolerate any lowering of their government-guaranteed retirement age, and the flash mobs that terrorized American cities earlier this year. At the heart of their worldview is an unfocused nastiness and nihilism that confirms that human progress is not a continuous upward trend after all.
By gosh I think you're right. I can tell, though that you remember when your brain was a bit addled too.
ReplyDeleteAnd I wrestle with all the implications of that.
ReplyDelete