The Naked Apes of Occupy Wall Street
20 October 2011 Edward Cline http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/markets/financial-crisis/6628-the-naked-apes-of-occupy-wall-street.htmlAnd what have you? You have a naked ape. A protester against corporate greed, an advocate of expropriating wealth and the means of production. A frightening, noisy, intimidating mob stripped of everything they are protesting against.
While immersed in the 1920’s to complete my latest detective novel, chickens came home to roost on Wall Street. Also, wannabe hippies, yippies, union thugs, and the countless clueless who went to “occupy” Wall Street because they had nothing better to do. I watched and read with dismay the trashing of that short but great street as hundreds, then thousands blocked it, trashed it, yelled at it, probably urinated on it, and then camped out on Zuccotti Park. Or rather, took it over.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the “Duke of New York,” has not ordered the police to clear out the park. He has not called in companies of riot police armed with shields, batons, and Mace. He has not brought in fire engines to hose the barbarians, not so much to give them much needed baths, as to drive them off into custody. But then Bloomberg endorses the Ground Zero Mosque. Perhaps he likes the new “Camp of the Saints.”
The mainstream media has done its best to sanction and egg on the “protestors.” The only objective reporting on the continuing outrage can be found in the non-MSM. From Brian Williams to Diane Sawyer to Matt Lauer, the yelping and gesticulating and sign-carrying on Lower Manhattan amuses them, encourages them. It is provocative and newsworthy. The Occupiers of Wall Street get a free pass, references to the American Revolution, and sonorous sympathy, something the MSM never gave the Tea Party.
To reprise the MSM’S role in perpetuating the alleged “spontaneity” of the occupiers’ “freedom of expression” would be redundant here. Much has been made by the non-MSM of the hypocrisy of the occupiers. Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish is especially on top of the irony of thousands of trust fund beneficiaries protesting the system that makes trust funds possible, and has written a number of perceptive pieces on the character of the protesters and of the phenomenon. Kelly O’Donnell of Canada Free Press exposes the bogus “spontaneity” of the masses of Zuccotti Park by tracing its funding and organization to that Marxist billionaire, George Soros, its endorsement by William Ayers, the former Weatherman bomber, and other notorious notables. All this ground and more have been covered by those not distracted by the task of finishing a novel.
What I would like to do here to present The Naked Ape. I saw a picture somewhere of the protesters on which someone had written all the product names of the things worn and used by the protesters: the cap from Gap, the cameras by Sony, shoes by Nike, the iPods by Apple, and so on. In short, the protesters were protesting the corporations that produced those objects and which helped to facilitate their protest.
Now, governments produce nothing but forms and other kinds of paperwork, and even here government printing offices rely on technology and methods they never originated and could not improve on. The Congressional Record, the Federal Register, White House invitations, and your dollar bills all have their roots in some individual’s or private corporation’s innovation. All the desks, equipment, technology, family pictures, pens, pencils, glass in the windows, rugs, paint on the walls, insulation, flags, memo pads, etc. in any given politician’s office are all privately produced. Not even the military develops its own weapons; that task is farmed out to independent contractors in the private realm. There’s no such thing as a government tank factory or munitions farm.
I will take that photograph one step further.
Picture a protester, fully dressed, armed with his cell phone, iPod, perhaps with a poncho rolled up in his backpack along with toiletries and other necessities.
Take away his cap – his shirt and tee-shirt – his watch – his jacket – his backpack and all is contents – his sweater or sweatshirt – his cell phone – his camera – any other gizmo he has become dependent on to communicate with his pals or to see what else is happening on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and other social sites – his wallet – his pants – his underwear – his socks – his shoes – his shaving instruments – his deodorant (if any) – his hair cut (if he has had one) – his pill box, nasal spray, inhaler, chap stick, or whatever else enables him to breathe without difficulty – his childhood inoculations – his cigarettes – his lighter – his plastic packet of whatever else he may smoke – his glasses or contacts – his tent – his sleeping bag.
Take away his cardboard sign and the length or wood or plastic it may be affixed to, if it is affixed to anything. Take away the marker or pen or spray that printed the words on it.
No Starbucks. No Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. No Zuccotti Park-cooked pasta and stir-fried veggies. Maybe cockroaches. Or silverfish. Or dead rats. But nothing prepared in defiance of Mother Earth. No Poland Spring water. No plastic water bottles at all.
And what have you? You have a naked ape. A protester against corporate greed, an advocate of expropriating wealth and the means of production.
Picture a woman and do the same to her. No hairspray, either. No make-up kits. No dyes. No lipstick. No tampons. No nail polish. No clothes. No gizmos. No signs. Nothing.
And there is the female of the species.
Don’t avert your eyes. Multiple those two images by the thousands, in Technicolor. Pack them all together on Wall Street or Broad Street or Broadway, and what have you?
A frightening, noisy, intimidating mob stripped of everything they are protesting against. A George Romero-like Dawn of the Dead. A phenomenon more repellent than a canvas by Pieter Brueghel the Elder of peasants cavorting in the mud. Coming at you, the middle class, the bourgeoisie, the producer of wealth. The owner of wealth. The property owner. The honest wage-earner. The hot dog vendor. The cabbie. The investor. The industrialist. The inventor. The risk-taker. The gainfully employed in any private capacity. The self-employed. The bill-payer. The tax-payer. The savings account owner. The rich. The modestly well-off. Aspirants to being rich or modestly well-off.
Coming to get you, because the naked apes are none of those things.
They are coming at you and for you. If you don’t join them, and apologize, and hand over your property, your wealth, and your life, and join, not their “99%,” but their actual 0.83%, they intend to kill you. So said one protester during the Oakland “occupation.”
Lout: S—t…won’t be exactly how you want it. S—t’s gonna change. You don’t know what’s gonna happen….
Tea Party interviewer: What do you do with the people who don’t want to change their beliefs, or don’t agree with you?
Lout: Kill ‘em. (“Just kiddin’,” he added with a chuckle, but it was too late. His answer came instantly, eagerly, and from the gut.)
Lenin wasn’t kidding. Nor was Hitler. Nor Stalin, nor Mao or Pol Pot. It’s anyone’s guess that Obama isn’t kidding, either. Or William Ayers. Or George Soros.
So, it isn’t a matter of hypocrisy. It’s not an issue of venality. That is not what the protesters are primarily guilty of. It is of allowing themselves to be brainwashed so thoroughly by their educators that they can no longer think. Their brains have been automatized or programmed to repeat whatever their teachers wished them to think. If they are protesting anything, it should be their government-mandated, state-commanded, and bureaucrat-tailored education.
They should be protesting the government’s involvement in their lives and in their futures. By extension, they should be protesting in favor of private property, wealth accumulation, individual rights, and for getting the government out of the economy.
Instead, they are demanding more of what has stunted their minds. And they believe – not think – but believe that impoverishing everyone will compensate for their imagined persecution and purported downtroddeness and make things right and level so that no one will envy anyone else. Their obvious and enervating malice was bred in our schools as surely as Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to drool.
Do not bother asking them to know cause and effect. Syllogisms are beyond their ability to grasp. To them, there is no cause and effect. Things just are. The universe is causeless. Human action is causeless. The unskilled laborer, with nothing to offer the world but his muscles and capacity for mindless routine, is the source of all wealth, which the rich and the industrious and the innovators have somehow stolen from him. Steve Jobs’s personal net worth was $7 billion. He should have been made to exist on a ditch-digger’s wage, and to give them their iPods and other gizmos, too. So they have been taught. All differences in wealth and standards of living are inequitable and unjust, they were taught. The solution is to abolish all equity and the concept of justice.
So, imagine that army of naked, gibbering, wild-eyed apes heading in your direction. John Dewey and a host of other Progressive educators set them loose. And they were made possible by Immanuel Kant, Heidegger, and other philosophers. Karl Marx? He was a Johnny-Come-Lately heir of Kant and Hegel.
Ideas have consequences. And there they are, in Lower Manhattan, occupying it.
