The Weekly Screed (#581)

Time for the Occupy gang to pick a lane
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Like most Sixties-bred crypto-revolutionaries, I had hopes that the Occupy movement’s May Day protests would ignite populist pyrotechnics from coast to coast. And I knew, of course, that no such thrill was imminent.

Predictably, Occupy events barely made a ripple in the May 1 news cycle, which dwelt instead on a year-old story — the killing of Osama bin Laden. Even Mitt Romney’s graceless poormouthing of 87-year-old Jimmy Carter got more airtime. This is quite a comedown for a movement that, eight months ago, was the media’s candidate to replace the Tea Party as the Voice of the People.

As Fred Willard might say, “Wha’ hoppen?”

Luckily, on May Day, I was reading Mark Kurlanksky’s 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, where I found sort of an answer. 1968 was a year that had more historic events than most decades. But the moments in ’68 that most altered America’s future were the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Each death rendered leaderless a major popular cause at a critical time in its existence.

After Rev. King was killed in Memphis, other black leaders sprang up, from Ralph Abernathy to Stokely Carmichael to Barack Obama. But in more than 40 years, no public figure has shown Rev. King’s gift for bringing together — for the sake of social justice — people who normally would not come together. The spiritual and moral force of the civil rights movement withered without Rev. King, freeing his opponents to begin their steady, stealthy and remarkably effective effort to re-segregate America.

RFK’s death, on the night he became the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, was likewise disastrous. It virtually orphaned the anti-war movement. As the brother of a martyred hero who had committed America to saving South Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy uniquely possessed the legitimacy and political juice to get us out. With RFK out of the way, we were stuck with Richard Nixon, who had far more to gain from teasing us about ending the war — at a cost of 20,000 dead GIs — than just ending it.

The opening of the Occupy website reads: “Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions.”

The most significant words in this sentence are “political” and “leaderless.” Politics is — more than anything else — the process of choosing leaders. The term “leaderless movement” is not quite an oxymoron. It’s possible to have a movement without leaders, but it requires an opposition equally headless, or headed by incompetents.

In 1964, the Free Speech movement at Berkeley sprang up under Mario Savio, one of the most eloquent activists in U.S. history. But after a brief period of celebrity, Savio was hounded into silence by a politician who had a much better grasp of what it means to achieve power and to exploit a position of leadership: Governor Ronald Reagan.

Savio was a popular guy while he lasted, because everybody loves spontaneous populism. When the Occupy gang turned Zuccotti Park into a great big Greenwich Village campout, they quickly captured the fancy of the MSM and turned into a worldwide hit. I kept meaning to take the “A” train, drop in on Zuccotti Park and hang out with the insurgency (and never got around to it). But I did buy the t-shirt. And I love the slogan: “We are the 99 percent!”

“Power to the People.” “Off the Pig.” “Up Against the Wall.” Far out.

While postponing my trip to the park, I watched the Web, expecting the Occupiers to write their platform, issue demands and rally behind their own version of Rev. King, Mario Savio, Louise Day Hicks — somebody. At least they could do like the Yippies in ’68 and nominate a pig for president.

Ah, but nobody.

Eventually, the clearest message articulated by the whole glorious here-today, gone-tomorrow Occupation was that there ain’t no message. No, wait. That’s not fair. If you gather up all the messages that were mentioned, muttered, whispered, hollered, tweeted and repeated among all the Occupiers, then mash them together (because no single message is greater than the sum of all messages), and then listen intently — with your heart not your ears — the answer that floats into your consciousness, like a scene from 2001:A Space Odyssey, is a sort of communal, transcendental ur-message that bypasses politics and proceeds directly into the realm of spirituality.

Or, as we used to say in ‘68: “Psychedelic!”

Speaking of ‘68, that era was the heyday of the patron saint of leaderless leadership — Ralph Nader. Starting as a consumer crusader, Nader became one of America’s most trusted figures. But he shunned the media, refused public office and lived like a hermit — so that he couldn’t be accused of seeking favors or compromising his rigid principles.

History will remember Nader’s integrity, his tenacity and his battle to kill the Corvair. But it will also recall the 97,000 votes he won in Florida in a quixotic 2000 presidential bid that clotheslined Al Gore and bestowed the White House on a silver-spoon “oilman” who represented the antithesis of everything Nader stands for.

All of which cycles back to the joy of spontaneous populism, which is most fun when you get a big bunch of boys and girls together sitting on the grass, singing ‘round the campfire, playing bongos, pitching tents, roasting weenies, making s’mores, smoking dope, sharing bodily fluids and talking ‘til dawn. Woodstock all over again, dude.

But the beauty, and irony, of Woodstock was: There truly was no message. At all. Not even a cosmic collective message. It was just the biggest party anybody ever threw.

Unlike Woodstock, the Occupy thing isn’t art, music, peace and party time. It’s politics. Politics has consequences — just as Ralph Nader, for all his denials, is a politician personally responsible for eight creepy years of Dick Cheney. If they want to stick around and make a difference, the Occupy people need to understand their own power, decide how to use it and pick a grownup to put in charge.

Or, as my grandmother used to say: “Piss or get off the pot.”