Fleabaggers

Glenn Greenwald is pissed that we’re not paying more attention to the World’s Lamest Flash Mob:

It’s unsurprising that establishment media outlets have been condescending, dismissive and scornful of the ongoing protests on Wall Street. Any entity that declares itself an adversary of prevailing institutional power is going to be viewed with hostility by establishment-serving institutions and their loyalists…

Nor is it surprising that much of the most vocal criticisms of the Wall Street protests has come from some self-identified progressives, who one might think would be instinctively sympathetic to the substantive message of the protesters.

Er… substantive message?

Let’s go back to the start:

On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people to flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices and we will not leave until that demand has been met.

And that One Simple Demand?

Well, um, there wasn’t any:

What we demand from our government is for the people to decide through democratic consensus, not this website.

So, how did the People reach their Democratic Consensus? A Facebook poll. (We voted for “A Shrubbery”, and we’re seriously considering a splinter group because our voice wasn’t heard.)

Leading the poll — with a very democratic less than a quarter of the votes — is “Revoke Corporate Personhood”. Which, if you follow the logic, means that the protesters are demanding that Wall Street overturn a Supreme Court decision. If that happens, we’ll be hitting the streets just as the protesters are heading home. We prefer our oligarchs to be a tad less obvious about their power.

To answer Greenwald (and Firedoglake and Keith Olbermann): We’ll take Occupy Wall Street seriously as soon as they give us a reason to. Incoherent moral preening doesn’t count.

And that’s not even what set us off about their proclamation. No, this was:

Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

We stand behind nobody in condemning what America has become in the thirty years of our adulthood — especially the past decade — but give us a fucking break. The good people of Egypt were living under tyranny — honest-to-gosh, police-state, who-disappeared-the-neighbors tyranny. Your vanity protest doesn’t show solidarity with your brothers and sisters in Tahrir, it trivializes the very real, and very mortal, dangers they faced. A bad cop with a can of mace doesn’t make a martyr. Give us a call when you see tanks coming up Wall Street.

Besides, it’s not like America didn’t enjoy a legitimate Populist Moment this year — a moment far more honest than Right-promoted Teabaggers or Left-promoted Fleabaggers, a moment so surprising, so truly shocking in its force, that it left jaws dropping across the spectrum while celebrating the People’s right to assemble and demand redress of real grievances against their government.

Or has everybody forgotten Wisconsin?