What's It All About?

The Short answer is: Nobody knows what it's all about.  And that's pretty encouraging to me.

When the Tea Party thing first popped up, it had a kind of organic feel to it, but almost immediately, when Michelle Bachmann jumped in front of it - and then when Dick Armey slithered in - suddenly it was all about GOP talking points or some other templated 'conservative' nonsense.  The rallies had all the authenticity of an Up With People performance from 1970, and the original themes that grew out of a reasonable rejection of Tax Payer bailouts for the crooks on Wall Street morphed into the old familiar bits about Tax-and-Spend, Deficit Hawkery and National Debt Anxiety.  It was one of the slickest bamboozles anybody'd ever seen (and btw: it made Dick Armey a fuckload of money).

So along comes OWS.  Basically the same thing as the Tea Party (albeit without all the blue hair).  And while there have always been crazies of the type who always gravitate towards any kind of power center, OWS has maintained a very different feel to it.  They don't have a real org chart.  They don't have designated spokespeople.  They have a generally stated list (of sorts) of the things they want to see addressed and/or remedied, but they're resisting efforts to be defined and then co-opted by the very entities they're determined to push against.  By staying more or less passive and unconfined by conventional politicking, they gain strength while they wait to discover what OWS is to become.

If you want a fair parallel, go back and watch The Social Network again, and pay close attention to the conflict between Zuckerberg and Saverin when facebook was still just a college campus thing.  As facebook was starting to take off, the 'normal' next step was to figure out how to monetize it - to make it make money.  But Zuckerberg resists, saying they don't know what it is yet - that they may have created something that fundamentally changes the way people interact; on a truly global scale.  Trying to shoehorn the thing into the standard Harvard Biz School model would be like Secretariat pullin' a plow.

So there's absolutely no need to make OWS fit neatly into whatever frame of reference we have on hand right now today.  In fact, I think what OWS needs is to resist all efforts to rein it in and to make it into something it's not.  I get a weird feeling that OWS is a very close approximation of what democracy is supposed to look like.  Maybe that's why we're having such a hard time recognizing it.