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The assorted “Occupations” may be drawing to a close as even liberal mayors have lost patience with the occupation of public space and the budget drain created by aging radicals, wannabe hippies and random homeless people, hucksters, scammers and professional activists, but it isn’t over because it never really began.
To the left protest is an identity, which is also why the Occupations never seemed to have much of a coherent message. The purpose of their protests is to protest, the romance of the protest is all the justification that it really needs. Creating permanent protest encampments turned protests from an occasional activity into a theme park, and that was what Zuccotti Park really was, a protest theme park for overgrown children too old to go to Disneyland, who instead tried to go back to the seventies.
The left is one long permanent protest by useful idiots whose dissatisfaction makes them seek out alternative societies in the guise of denouncing this one. Zuccotti Park was Neverland, as it would be in the real world, complete with disease, rapes and a rising body count. Peter Pan had a bong, Wendy had body piercings, the Lost Boys had game consoles and no desire to go to work tomorrow. Together they recreated the same old narrative of Woodstock to Altamont.
Today’s Peter Pans and Wendys are as likely to be successful professionals as the old stereotype of dropouts who couldn’t hack it. They have degrees, often more than one, many of them have jobs that the actual 99 percent would kill for, and family backgrounds in the upper and upper middle-class. What they aren’t is adults. And that is an indictment of a culture whose top 9 percent sees no reason to keep going.
Generations of the left have produced children who are trained for success, who have the right tools and the right background, but who have also imbibed the idea that hard work is drudgery and that the only thing worth doing well is trying to overthrow society centered around some incompatible combination of the pleasure principle and social welfare for everyone. Those brats aren’t just squatting in dirty tents, many of them are lawyers, public officials and cabinet members.
The history of the left is of childishly naive ideals fought for with ugly tactics and implemented as totalitarian dystopias. “Everyone should have things and no one should feel bad” quickly morphs into “Off the pigs” and finishes as “Starve the Kulaks” and “Bring on the Gulags”. What begins with flowers ends with bombs and bullets, and depending on the outcome, sobs and bitter recollections of how the revolution was crushed, or revisionist history that denies everything that happened since the revolution succeeded.
The modern left’s strange combination of lotus eaters and fire breathers, freeloaders and fanatics, isn’t a split personality, it’s the identity of people who have been deprived of every other form of identity, who romanticize alienation even when they are actually insiders, because they are no longer members of a nation, a nationality, a religion or even a professional class. They are the lost boys and girls still looking for happiness long after their grandparents failed to find in drugs and communes, and their great-grandparents failed to find it in psychoanalysis and decadence, and their great-great-grandparents failed to find it in spirit rapping and unstructured poetry.
Those for whom happiness is escape briefly found it in a cluster of dirty tents, volunteerism, drugs, communal sleeping arrangements and the collapse of societal boundaries as the edge of a new world. Neverland with drugs, casual sex and a feeling of self-satisfaction at one’s own self-righteousness. It wasn’t a new discovery. The Lotus was known for thousands of years along with its bitter aftertaste. What follows after all the rules are broken is the discovery of how bad life can be without them.
At Zuccotti Park, the professional activist, working for unions and community groups, encountered the professional protester, who goes to a bewildering mix of rallies to spew his hate at his favorite targets, and together they ran into the lost boys and girls who confused anti-capitalism with utopia, and they all met the homeless and the huckster– the men and women living in actual poverty on the edge of their shining societies out of view of their parents’ mansions.
