Artificial Rage

The Winter Will Chill the Discontented

The collective globe is holding its breath.  OWS has arrived and is spreading around the world like a virus.  What, we hear you ask?  Yes, you know, "Occupy Wall Street".  Around the world in several countries, including New Zealand, "spontaneous" protests have erupted against--well, let's see now--corporate greed, capitalists, bankers, plutocratic government and whole bunch of other stuff--like, the "gummint needs to pay for my college education".  It has even reached the Dunedin Octagon.  Amazing really. 

Colour us sceptical, but it has a deja-vu patina.
  In most Western democracies there is a tiny cluster of reflexive protesters.  Angry street demonstrations are their mode of operation.  They search around for causes to latch on to and to protest over.  They give the impression of being keen to protest their mother's halitosis if they thought it would get folk energised and out on the street.  In New Zealand we have John Minto--now politely called a "veteran"; how many causes has John, megaphone in hand, professionally protested on the taxpayer's dime over the years?  And then there is Sue Bradford.  Annette Sykes.  A cluster of union activists (the names change as they move on up union ranks to enter Parliament)

Several years ago we had the infamous "anti-globalization" protests--usually held in conjunction with international economic summits of one kind or another.  The protesters assured us they hated MacDonalds and Big Oil, and the death of the planet, and other minor inconveniences.  Naomi Klein was their Joan d'Arc.  They would show up at an international convention, smash a few shop windows, set a few cars alight, have a jolly good riot--then disperse when the conference was over. 

The OWS charade is just another morph of the same reality, same actors, same agitators--same old, same old.  The lame stream media are trying to gee the thing up as some avatar of a new political direction, a progressive version of "tea-partyi-sm", a wave about to engulf the West in a new paroxysm of rebirth into a higher social and economic being.  Sensation sells newspapers and subscriptions.

Regrettably, it is nothing more than a cluster of ugly riots by the privileged who know nothing about real degradation, poverty and disease.  It is a rich man's luxury, a leech that feeds off the very system it wishes to pull down.  Its grievance is more disingenuous than the evils they profess to oppose.  Those involved are, to use Lenin's phrase, useful idiots. 

The hard-core of ideological agitators don't care so much about the cause as the chaos, the riots.  We suspect that what they want is some public sacrifice--like a modern Kent-State Shooting--that will polarise and then galvanize a popular uprising.  That is why the "demands" are so confused, diverse, and inchoate.  What they really want is a national riot.  A few protesters machine gunned.  Cannon fodder. 

Pity the northern hemisphere is heading into winter.  It is likely the weather will have a decidedly cooling effect upon the "Day of Rage".