Everything Old Is Old Again
My good friend Promethean Antagonist posts an excellent Mark Steyn quote:
[...“]It’s the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It’s more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don’t mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al, but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old “unemployed cosmetologist” with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it’s London, 1977, and she’s killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that’s three-and-a-half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America’s revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can’t even invent their own hideous fashion statements? [...“]
The other day I was listening to the local rock station while taking the Kid to school. It played some hit by some band that sounds exactly like some other band, then played Iron Man by Black Sabbath. I realized that when I was my kid’s age, it would have been the equivalent of playing a hit from 1980 followed by one from 1940. If Rock & Roll isn’t dead, then it’s on hospice.
The OWS protesters are “playing protester” and consciously mining previous movements because they don’t have any original ideas (or styles) of their own. Why? Because they don’t know what they are protesting about. They don’t have unjust laws and Bull Connor splitting their skulls the way Civil Rights protesters had. They don’t have the prospect of being drafted and returning home in a body bag the way the anti-war Vietnam protesters had (although technically, most of the protesters had deferments and those that actually could be drafted supported the war – so this might be a stretch). And honestly, “Give us free stuff so we can sit around playing with ourselves” doesn’t really make for good slogan or protest fodder.
But it sounds like the OWS is falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions. That happens in experiments in anarchism, and is usually replaced by authoritarianism (see Paris Commune 1848).
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