Like frogs on the Nile, yes, fools are always with us but they do not always rain from the sky. Now they do. Unlike Pharoah we have no excuse to be surprised. Self-employed fool and liar Michael Moore gave us probably the earliest warning when he appeared on the Rachel Maddow show just in March with a pair of handcuffs pledging to slap them on some generic Wall Streeter and/or the lucky krillionaires of the Forbes 400. Did he not know that his good friend and ideological playmate Oprah is on that list? Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett are as well. Yes, the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch are there but are we really going to raid the blimp-born fortress of everyone’s favorite currency trader, George Soros? Doubtful. Moore isn’t merely offering up his friends and financiers though. With Steve Jobs death yesterday there is a solid chance that Moore has moved onto the precious pecking order. So I suppose Moore could surrender his wealth to himself, to be administered for The Good of the People, but will he also then run Oprah’s Book Club or Buffett’s trading empire? It seems that what he means is that the offending assets will be auctioned and the cash doled out on demonstrated need. Who would be bidding in such an auction is mysterious but with his self-indicting and incoherent rant he manages to claim the intellectual high ground amongst his peers.

We haven’t heard from Roseanne Barr in many a moon but she has decided to howl yet again. From her sprawling macadamia ranch in Hawaii she swarms in, having traveled on solar aircraft, naturally, to declare a nostalgic fondness for the guillotine. She pledges to seize all the wealth over $100 millions, a nice round figure you have to admit. But she doesn’t simply condemn those fatcats to a French haircut, she gives them a Khmer Rouge style shot at redemption in “re-education camps”. We have no details on the standards to graduate from these as yet non-existent institutions but certainly Roseanne will sit on the board that makes these decisions. She has no need of re-education. It didn’t take the first time. But she will learn much indeed when someone moves the top rate down further, to say, $10 millions, at which point the government will be in the macadamia business which is quite lucrative.

If Moore diddles with Marxism and Rosie with Pol Pot, still they are leaders of their cause in morality, practicality and clarity. The next tier down, at the level of the free weekly, we have a fellow in the Village Voice; a theater critic like Frank Rich before him, who has serious political views. He solves New York’s many problems in one fell swoop. According to the Forbes list, there are 53 of these billionaire scoundrels in the city; a city that labors under poverty and, I shit you not, lacks a permanent classical repertory theater. Or a passable one, at any rate. These are the twin heads of evil and exploitation so kill the hoarders, seize their wine cellars and for god’s sake put on a decent run of Uncle Vanya! Again this fellow leaves sober and respectable Marxism a vanishing speck in the rear-view mirror. We are left searching for a historical figure more malign than Pol Pot to anchor this proposal of murder and plunder in history. The real Stalin would be slandered by the association so let us say quite cautiously that Feingold proposes the kulak-killing benefits of Stalinism but without the refined administrative due process.

Like the Nile frogs, these fools and numerous clones have been fooling around for a long time. It’s little surprise that their foolishness is cresting and it wouldn’t amount to a biblical plague but the ordinary cultural infrastructure that discourages and minimizes public psychological nudity is somnolent at best. If the mainstream of mainsteamers, Oprah, does not know or does not understand that Moore recently offered her pad up for hippie squatters she likewise might not understand what a serious and dangerous thing it is. But she shows no sign of having heard of this incident at all. Nor does Moore. His latest genius proposal is that wealthcriminals Oprah and Tom Hanks run for the highest office; whether together or as antagonists is unclear but it seems that the wealth that comes from Oprahism and Hanksism is not suspect. Likewise Roseanne, when questioned, makes exceptions for some rich bastards who have gotten filthy in the morally upright entertainment industry. Not counting pornographers. Except maybe for Larry Flynt. But the waivers from death and despoliation are few. Even fewer are so-called responsible parties who denounce the Moores, Barrs(?) and Feingolds for the Ostrogoths they are. Where are the media and political giants who could not wait for an arrest or insult to actually happen before denouncing the TEA Party demonstrations as Klan rallies? Well, we know where they are. In their hearts they are WITH the clownish threat-mongers, constantly certain that, hey, they aren’t talking about ME! That’s Donald Trump and maybe Bloomberg I guess. So the usual shelter we have from the rain of ordinary foolishness has been packed away in the night. By whom? No one will say.

However large, there are only so many of these gormless gasbags and in Moore’s case, he is blessedly conducting a boycott of Georgia so the impact is manageable. But the disease of foolitis contagious. Now it has spread to multitudes. We have hot zones breaking out all across the nation (except in the Capital, hmm…). The walking, ravenous braindead call themselves Occupy Wall Street and that, at the least, they have done. The home office in New York seems to count about two hundred to two thousand fluctuating with different events. These numbers are considered dissappointing according to the organizers but no demonstration is too small if it is for the right cause! With Media Magic; the close up and the tracking shot, it seems a Red Sea of people you can smell right through the television parts for traffic but rumbles back in righteous fury when the lights change. The tryouts for this psycho-circus, both the personel and the methods were in Madison, Wisconsin and a similar vein of unreality runs through it still. You recall that in Madison the protests were to maintain a status quo that would have bankrupted the state to provide health and retirement benefits to public employees far more remunerative than that enjoyed by your average taxpayer. That the system would close entire schools due to the crunch was immaterial. The inevitable public employee layoffs? No such thing, a scarecrow constructed by the satanic Governor Walker. Numbers? Rubbish. The tax rates are too low, that is the problem and easily fixed. This kind of blockheadedness is also nothing new under the sun but normal, nihilistic and suicidal crony socialism is not what we are seeing in New York. Indeed, like Moore with his uncontroversial plan, the Madison squatters were far more intelligible and reasonable than today’s writhing precipitation of humanity.

We begin with their agreed upon public demands. I will only link the 13 Points not reproduce them. Sometimes these globe-huggers are surprisingly sticky about licensing. But what is revealed? Again, it smells like Marxism but without the foresight and generous spirit! Repetition and contradiction snap at each other but we can dig out a few concrete morsels. Numero Uno is wages. The Occupiers (and when did that become cool?) want a $20 minimum wage. Further they want a “living wage” which will be a handy tool to employ when, inevitably, that $20 is inflated away until it is unliveable. Free this and that are also on the menu. I suppose college professors, so well represented among the fools, will donate their labors to make good on that free college plank. Demand Eleven is a real curiosity and not just because this public statement suddenly veers into the first person; the provision calls for a full abrogation of all debts. All, as in all debts on the earth. The planet earth. Earth. Yes, this earth. Any legal foundation for this? None. Any enforcement body for this? None. Any nod to practicality? None. Even Marx would find these idiots unuseful. And the next demand that outlaws all credit reporting agencies makes the notion even more absurd, as we could not, by law, know who owes what to whom wherever! Mao is aghast in his tomb. Lenin, were he alive, would blow his brains out. Trotsky would jump off a bridge.

The hail of doofs has not just outstepped the stupidity of routine free lunchism. Not in New York. As a scrum they threaten a full scale experiment in climatological darwinism. You see, the heart of the protest, as in Tahiri Square, is that a critical mass of the protestors is always on site and not out of mind. There are a good few hundred who sleep rough in Gucci Park or whatever it is called, and now, who would have thought it, the nights grow bitter. The cry goes out for sleeping bags. But there are stiff objections. What will you do, go down to Target and just pour money into those thieves pockets? That’s an outrage and a betrayal! Can we get the fabrics and make our own sleeping bags? Experienced campers council, no. And in any case you are then just feeding Big Fiber instead of Big Retail. In their eagerness to scrub the taint of commercialism from their greasy hair the protestors could  suffer malnutrition, dehydration and exposure if anyone is vicious enough to explain to them from where their every necessity comes. Are they digging oysters from New York’s oyster beds or collecting mushrooms from Central Park? Unless some loaves and fishes action goes on, this will not be sufficient and no, they are NOT living off the land. They are living off their fellow man. They simply disdain to compensate him in any way. You find also at the linked document a call for help from doctors, lawyers, shrinks (oh, yeah)… in short just the sort of deep pocketed villains they insult and revile when on duty. Hypocrisy is not the only malady here for when they are clear and uncontradictory, their messages are vile, ignorant and pedestrian. What is more banal than cursing Jews for money lending, for example?

Unlike money, dummies DO grow on trees, or will swing down from them when baited with pizza and bucket drums. No, they aren’t all so hopeless. I saw a vid of a young fellow screaming an excellent critique on the Federal Reserve and a few who did seem to grasp the basics of finance. And their basal aggravation with the bailed, failed golden parachutists is also nothing to sneeze at. But it seems what we have here is little more than a blooming of juvenile grudges. Grassroots? No, the simple numbers dispel that. The incoherence is born from the organizers logical desire to keep the body count as high as possible; all are welcome (which has brought up a few unfunny security concerns). However the fair-minded folks at AdBusters may try, the Occupation is doomed. Biz on Wall Street is unaffected. The protests will add not one dime to federal coffers (the main concern of our teenaged anarchists). As for New York and the other cities so plagued, there will be titanic costs in law enforcement, hygiene and lost sales. The one discernible commonality seems to be a general support for Barack Obama, this is also a wasting asset. There only remain a few things to do and the protestors will certainly not participate in any helpful way in the necessary quarantine, the malodorous clean-up and a return to business as usual.

But if they can endure a New York winter in homemade sleeping bags I may have to revise my calculations. Good luck, chums. Huddle close.

 

 

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