Selling Out

It's settling in like a deep chill in my bones. Perhaps it has something to do with getting slightly too excited, a little more hopeful that warm weather was here than I should have been. I stripped my coat and danced a jig in my shirt. I dragged my waltz-stepping feet through the fallen leaves on the sidewalks. But now I'm cold and it's a problem. You see, these last couple weeks Roscoe's begun to despair.

The two party system is an abject failure. The financial system that supports it crawls with maggots and head lice and crabs. Based on their decision-making our corporate leaders appear in the final stages of the same syph that felled Nietzsche. However, instead of weeping for a whipped horse, they do the whipping, and in this moribund phase of their decayed intellectual lives their tenacity and depravity grows stronger.

But Roscoe doesn't despair for his shameful country. Having come of age in the era of 9/11 (I'd turned 21 two weeks before), Roscoe's used to that.

Enter Occupy Wall Street.

There have been many iconic moments so far in the movement. At the forefront we see the occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge, the young women corralled and pepper-sprayed by police in lower Manhattan, Scott Olsen's bloodied, petrified face as he's carried to help in the arms of fellow protesters asking his name, police jabbing Berkeley students in the stomachs with their batons and pulling them out of line by the hair, the 84 year-old woman sprayed in Seattle, the Oakland PD's lacerating another vet's spleen, students sprayed like roaches on the campus of UC Davis, ad nauseam.

Additionally, there's the interview between freelance writer Jesse LaGreca and a Fox News reporter from the early weeks of the movement. LaGreca's eloquence in articulating the corporate media's shortcomings and the political and economic disenfranchisement of the majority of Americans over the last thirty years was useful in that it disproved certain stereotypes of the occupiers promulgated by the media as unthinking dope-fiend disciples of Obama. LaGreca's interview, unaired on Fox, went viral on the web, earning him props from celebrity figures like Jon Stewart, as well as guest spots on network programs like ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour,  RT TV, and, most recently, MSNBC's The Ed Show. While LeGreca's critiques of the nation's political and media landscapes are accurate, his sudden celebrity is the very thing individual occupiers must resist, lest the movement as a whole gets co-opted by the likes of the Democratic Party and networks like MSNBC, which the party relies upon for loyal partisan banter and shilling.

The Ed Show appearance was particularly odious. Pardon the cliché, but under Ed's brutish puppeteering, LaGreca played the faithful and soulless marionette. In his by-now trademark Union cap (a politically-minded fashionista at LeGreca's blog on the Daily Kos actually praised the cap, stating that he or she loves it), Ed played clips of Republican talking points that LeGreca then went to work on. Finally, under the pulls and twists of Ed's fat sausage fingers, he was led to praise how effective Obama's stimulus has been in getting Americans back to work. The manner in which MSNBC used LaGreca, who was more than happy, it must be said, to oblige, bodes poorly for the future of the movement if it is to avoid co-option by the very forces responsible for the social, financial and political problems it protests. The unyielding, unconditional support of the Democratic Party by corporate megastars like Ed, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell need to be challenged by people from the movement, not flattered. They are the media-equivalent of the false, lesser-of-two-evils political choice that progressively minded people have felt obliged out of fear to make for a very long time at the voting booth.  

There's a reason Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks ditched that network.

If anybody's been reading this blog, you'll see that Roscoe's recently shifted his pronoun use when discussing OWS from "We" to "Them." This shift has a lot to do with Roscoe's despair.