Buddy Jim gently scolds me in comments:
But...without the Abbie Hoffman's and Jerry Rubin's, you know what I mean? Attention whoring can be a positive, especially for these kids who are assembling only to be defined, used, dismissed as irrelevant. I'm a fan. I want them to stay put. I want more att'n whoring, more people to try to define them and what they want, more people to use them for their own cynical (or not) purposes (yes, you a-a-a-and Corporate, too!), more serious and important people to dismiss them. And, through it all and beyond it all, I want them to stay put... There was this thing back in these old Woolworth lunch counters in NC in the Sixties, sit-ins they called them. They, like Rosa Parks, just sat. This is Rosa's grandkids—and a buttload of them... And here we've been lamenting this generation's lack of commitment, lack of paying att'n to what's happening, lack of concern. That'll show us.
Goodbud Sasha scolds me harder!
I don't care if West or anybody else is a whore if they get the thing on the teevee because otherwise Murdoch gets to control the conversation. It can be George Clooney or Lady Gaga for all I care. Jim H. said it better. But this all has to be on the Twitter and iPhone and teevee or it will "fail." Also. Re "before I'm utterly convinced it will fail." What would failure or success look like? If it pushes Obama to the left, even a little it succeeds. Also BofA discovered a substantial sum of money that it had been cheating me out of last Friday (at my insistence). I think that is success.
I'm not Occupy neutral. I'm incapable of saying anything without self-irony, self-mockery, but I mean this as least snarkily as I'm able: I want to play. I need get on the bus into or out of Occupy soon, get on or off before it's crosses that Walmart bandwagon/martyr endcap of participation. I'm going downtown this Sunday if plans hold to see what October 2011 is doing that day, to see what it feels like, see if it stirs, to see what it feels like to have my photo taken by government agents, see if it stirs. We're never putting another dollar on our Bank of America credit card, gonna pay it off, use a card from the teachers' credit union, rebellion, motherfuckers. I'm remembering that being complicit in somethings doesn't make me a thorough hypocrite if I'm not complicit in all things, or rather, personally being .06% less of a tool makes me .06% less of a tool, and that's a modest enough goal I need to learn how to not feel I'm a fool in trying to obtain.
- Occupy is too big to fail?
- Occupy is the most significant radical movement since the 60s?
- The most important political happening since 1968?
- What are they angry about?
- The World's Second Shittiest Human says you're anti-Semitic.
- Anne Applebaum, more stupid than mendacious, more mendacious than stupid?
- Pitying billionaires.
- The 53% backlash.
- Going apeshit.
- The $600 trillion time bomb.
- Eternal politics of debt and forgiveness.
- Why non-violence?
- The Ron Paul media blackout. (h/t)
- A frothy mix of fecal matter and lube is a whiny little prick.
- Speaking of WalMart: my future hell, or: because there aren't enough cars on Rockville Pike already.
- All our questions are posed as answers.
- Silliman's always generous lit-links.
- Tom Waits has never worked for me, but if for you (and he has for many people whose musical tastes I admire), here, stream his new one.
- Sonic Youth's musical love story. Marriages are mysterious: it's not my place to be sad. I'm sad.
- This has been the only song in my head for the past five days, I can't make it stop, it's a good thing, it's Theme Song October 2011:
LAUNDRY
Bruce Smith
Not even the cops who can do anything could do this—
work on Sunday picking up dirty and delivering clean
laundry in Philadelphia. Rambling with my father, get this,
in a truck that wasn’t even our own,
part ambulance, part bullet, there wasn’t anything
we couldn’t do. Sheets of stigmata, macula of love,
vomit and shit and the stains of pissing
another week’s salary away, we picked up and drove
to the stick men in shirt sleeves, the thin
Bolshevik Jews who laughed out the sheets like the empty
speech in cartoons. They smelled better than sin,
better than decadent capitalism. And oh, we
could deliver, couldn’t we, the lawless bags through the city
that said in his yawn, get money, get money, get money.
