'Permanent Adolescents' Occupying NYC Zuccotti Park!

James Cessna · Oct 20, 2011

This review was very good.

"It turns out that 1960s radicals never die, they just turn rancid and say ridiculous things.. On a single placard I see at the activists’ encampment perfectly illustrates the grab-bagginess of it all: “Close the Corporate Tax Loopholes, Tax Religious Groups, End the Wars, Legalize Weed, and Bring Back Arrested Development.”

Good news for that crowd! "Arrested development" is alive and well in Zuccotti Park!"

I’ve always had a soft spot for Karl Marx’s famous mot about Hegel’s observation that history repeats itself. “He forgot to add,” said the Caliph of Communism, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” What happens, then, the third time around? The 1960s certainly had its tragic elements, and the passage of time, I suspect, mutes the bitterness of the many blighted lives and botched futures which that farcical repetition of earlier revolutionary idealism involved. Now, from our perch forty years on, it all seems faintly ridiculous: the incense and love beads; the imbecilic pseudo-radicalism; the bad taste in haberdashery, heroes, and haircuts; the mindless mantras of indemnified insurrectionists whose “idealism” was little more than an alibi for unfettered selfishness and insatiable hedonism. “We’re permanent adolescents,” boasted Jerry Rubin, a high priest of the movement. What sort of society produces “permanent adolescents” in any number? Only a very rich and a very indulgent one.

Back in the day, folks like Jerry Rubin at least had (briefly) the attraction of novelty. What about his heirs, the motley assemblage staffing the entertainment known as “Occupy Wall Street”? Isn’t it, as the philosopher Yogi Berra observed in another context, déjà vu all over again? First tragedy. Then farce. Now, incoherent childishness and pathetic exhibitionism.

The media, natch, has gobbled it up: “Extra! Extra! Read all about it: Anarchists Occupy Wall Street! People with funny hair, unpleasant tattoos, and bad spelling demand revolution!” In one sense, the sideshow that is Occupy Wall Street has been a gift to copy-hungry publications. It’s always fun to quote the permanent adolescents. As Art Linkletter knew, they say the darndest things. You might be worried about paying the mortgage and junior’s tuition; they get to denounce “corporations,” embrace the “environment,” and declare that “Christopher Columbus was the first Zionist.” Who knew? “This is what democracy looks like,” read the banners. Actually, as Anne Applebaum wrote in a column for Slate, it is not what democracy looks like. It’s what free speech looks like in one of its more histrionic varieties. “Democracy,” Applebaum notes, “looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary, and many unglamorous time-consuming activities,” none of which is as enjoyable as shouting slogans and mugging for the camera.

If sociological reportage describes one main stream of commentary about Occupy Wall Street, yearning nostalgia describes the other. It turns out that 1960s radicals never die, they just turn rancid and say ridiculous things. They may long ago have lost track of their love beads and peace pins, but somewhere deep down there lives an unextirpatable feeling of solidarity with the Age of Aquarius. The New York Times has been one reliable source of the phenomenon. The columnist Nicholas Kristof, for example, took one look at the spoiled children and social misfits cluttering up Zuccotti Park and declared that it was “reminiscent of Cairo’s Tahrir Square.” Here’s a question: How many things had to go wrong in Mr. Kristof’s brain for him to make that comparison with a straight face? “Reminiscent of” implies “analogous to.” In what sense is an aggregation of permanent adolescents in a park in downtown Manhattan analogous to the regime-changing tumult that exploded in Egypt last winter? In no sense. Mr. Kristof’s heady tweet was nonsense.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/10/20/the_99-percent_solution_111750.html
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botenth · Oct 20, 2011

...you have to love it the way it is.

Pokerface · Oct 20, 2011

I wished I owned the park. I would send those parasites back to their mother basement.

HB Surfer · Oct 20, 2011

OWS Protesters will be heard!!!

MisLed · Oct 20, 2011

the only thing dumber than a sixties hippie is the offspring of a sixties hippie.

If you go back and look at video footage of the little radicals of the sixties you'll realize how unrealistic and ignorant they were. You can still run into these people in universities. They are so easily recognized and so predictable.

James Cessna · Oct 20, 2011

MisLed said: ↑

The only thing dumber than a sixties hippie is the offspring of a sixties hippie.

If you go back and look at video footage of the little radicals of the sixties you'll realize how unrealistic and ignorant they were. You can still run into these people in universities. They are so easily recognized and so predictable.
Click to expand...

Ha-Ha!

You are very correct, MisLed.

The poison apple doesn't fall far from the poison tree!

James Cessna · Oct 21, 2011

botenth said: ↑

...you have to love it the way it is.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what this means.

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