Running for Your Life: Feeling “Occupied”

So, You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Trussed up with a bungee cord around a twenty-year-old street tree in Center Slope, laser-printed loose leaf sheet in a Ziploc clear-plastic envelope with a harsh message to an offending dog walker. Attached to the bungee cord slightly above the message lettering is a thin plastic sandwich bag of what looks like the hard black day-old scat of a lapdog.

*

You can’t get into a conversation in New York City today and not talk about the occupying force downtown. The protesters in Zuccotti Park. Not a single Z word that comes close. And before early October only the folks on the local community board knew that’s what that spot of green space just east of Ground Zero is called, now home to Occupy Wall Street.

OWS is a devilish venture. Before this one, the only ventures taken up in this neighborhood were real estate and financial ones. Like the spoof written by comedian Andrew Borowitz about Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs: “As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests,” wrote Blankfein, in a recent letter to investors. “And we have asked ourselves this question: ‘How can we make money off them?’ The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund.” This will invest in firms likely to benefit from social unrest, such as window repairers and makers of police batons. As Mr Blankfein explained: “At Goldman, we recognise that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain — but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.” As of this date (Nov. 10), the venture is 54 days old, and counting.

Devilishly clever for the use of the word: Occupy. The left, not too subtlely, force-feeding the idea that while America in modern times has often been viewed as an occupying force in foreign countries, it has never in its imperial history been occupied itself. On the face of it, meaning the simple truth that a challenging POV need not be one that America can submerge and control, rather that its own laws of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly afford the right to occupy a space – in this case one that is rapidly taking up not just a physical territory but mental and spiritual and digital ones, as stories and personal accounts proliferate about the free-speech righteousness of the 99 percenters.

(A tasty bit of irony: Private equity houses aren’t seeing much value in the retail space – even once-invincible Walmart’s year-to-date shares (+7.6%) are pretty pathetic – with the exception of the increasingly busy shopping destination of 99 percenters, the 99 Cent Stores .¤.¤. )

All of which is to say OWS has stoked up some talk. But a year ago last summer wasn’t Twitter similarly agog with protests about a planned mosque/education center, also at the outskirts of Ground Zero? In those days I’m sure Mayor Bloomberg was of the mind that there didn’t appear to be an endgame. That there was no telling when that fuss would all vanish. But it did. As, heretofore, has always happened in our thoroughly mediated society.

For those who lived during the Vietnam War, or during the Iranian hostage crisis, the idea of an ever-changing news cycle didn’t apply. Vietnam and Iran (for comparison, the Vietnam War lasted 19 years and 180 days and the Iranian hostage crisis: 444 days) simply led the newscasts day in, day out. News happens now in spurts: single Twitter-attention span events: Bush-Gore 2000, Shock and Awe, Katrina, BP oil spill, the Tea Party phenomenon.)

What would lead one to think that OWS will achieve even this level of newsworthiness? Aren’t allusions to Arab Spring overdone? As valid as some of the protesters beefs may be, USA of November 2011 is not Egypt of December 2010, or Libya of September 2011.

Consider the Tea Party, which earns an ever-lengthening Wiki entry for its efficacy in spurring change at the all-important electoral level. No single political movement has been as successful in exposing the weaknesses of the current administration than the vote-focused Tea Partiers.

Will the Tea Party or OWSers have a bigger impact on next year’s presidential election (341 days from today [Nov. 10])? It’s an open question now, but the Las Vegas odds makers would have to favor the TP. Absent a riot-police-dead-of-the-night attack on OWS, which today strikes me as something that would be sanctioned only by an authority with the political tone-deafness of a Tony “I’d Like My Life Back” Hayward, I don’t see OWS outdueling the Tea Party as a bigger influence in that all-important presidential vote on Nov 6, 2012. (ie, "Views From the Street, letter in the Nov. 5th edition of The Economist: "If voting worked, we would all be home right now": Brendan Burke, head of de-escalation security, Occupy Wall Street.)

In any event, it’s theater that can only start in a place like New York. And all eyes will be on that little Z in lower Manhattan to see how – and when – it ends.

Next: Running for Your Life: Runners’ Journals