Friends, OccupyJH wants more voters to become aware of who is corrupt, and why. Remember my position on standard reportage of our hobby group? My suggestion that we resist becoming a page-filling distraction only because a new aromatherapy shop didn’t open that week?
To clarify: when the press covers the Occupy Movement itself, it’s not covering why there is an Occupy Movement.
There’s a zillion corrupt things in government. It’s not that the corruption isn’t revealed. It’s just that facts no longer carry much weight in today’s political coverage, not as much weight as opinion and PR and “perception.”
Traditional reporting is supposed do that, but no such thing exists anymore, not the kind of reporting that helped our nation come to the right conclusion on Civil Rights, Vietnam and Nixon. (Thanks to the Occupiers of the day.) But the malefactors in the downturn of our nation have beat the press. TV news in particular avoids hard reporting by filling the airwaves with the entertaining aspects of “the horse race.” Nowadays traditional hard-boiled reporting is found on the web, sites like Talking Points Memo and ProPublica. The information is out there, information that if more widely known would affect the way we vote. Time spent dwelling on OccupyJH — who are they? what do they eat? do they dream of electric sheep? — is time a reporter is not spending looking into money buying legislation, looking into the purchased destruction of fair-minded regulations.
That said, the JH Weekly’s survey of OccupyJH last week was fair and clueful. Hoo-f’ing-ray. However, I direct your attention to the first comment below it, a sputtering, spleenful gem that sums up why we’re doomed. It’s both sad and hilarious. Sad because it’s another example of Fox-hardened reactionaries summoning energy to scorn the noncomplacent. Hilarious because of its hackneyed YOUR’RE DOING IT WRNGGG!!!11! brand of self-righteous, internet-based cowardly narcissism.
Let’s examine some snippets.
Message? And that message is (aside from “I don’t have much but ‘THEY’ do. But I don’t want to do much about it to better myself. It might mean doing something different, like leaving JH)….what?
This is Fox News Party propaganda at work: spreading fear through disinformation, spreading hate through an imagined victimhood. The anonymous writer (who frankly sounds drunk) regurgitates the Fox News talking point that Occupy has no single unifying message because we’re lazy, jealous thieves.
Then we have projection of the first order. Brutal self-interest is a right wing hallmark; therefore right wingers can’t help but think that everyone else operates solely out of brutal self-interest.
Why not “occupy” the local offices of Michael Enzi, John Barasso or Cynthia Lummis? Has anyone dared to confront or contact them? Do any of these “occupiers” recognize the names I just listed? . . .
Yeah, comrades, why haven’t we gone after the Wyo delegation? Perhaps it’s because we are stuck in a time-space continuum which prevents everything from happening at once? Why does DT (Drunk Typist) not know that a good many of us have held long, if mostly one-way, communication with our pols as a matter of routine? Why does DT not realize the futility of engagement at this point anyway? The system’s rotten to the core, there’s nothing to debate, we vote them out, bim bam boom.
The answer is, DT does not want to know. When you know eveyrthing you don’t have to learn anything new. I guess what really hurts is, if DT was on our side s/he would tell us the secret locations of the local offices of Barrasso and Lummis.
You honestly think hanging out with signs in front of Wells Fargo, or any bank is going to do anything but create a minor annoyance?
Nor does it occur to DT that we’re at the Y simply because it’s a dandy location for visibility. Wells Fargo just happens to be there. More annoying facts: we’re on a public corner with a nice, warm legal buffer from WF property. The branch is closed on Saturday afternoons when we’re there. Some of us have friends who work there. We’re holding to the Jackson small-town tradition of not getting personal — an agreement I violate here because DT is such a perfect example of the nastily and proudly misinformed.
Newsflash: your legislative representatives are addicts. The drug is money. The financial world, banks, Wall Street, etc., are to congress and the senate, what the Mexican drug cartels are to dope addicts. Do something about your elected officials’ appetite for money and you might see progress in leveling the playing field. You can only do this by scaring the politicians, not the banks.
Day-yam! DT knows the score! So why doesn’t s/he/it know that we also know this? I get the feeling that DT is a talker, a BSer, an anger-powered word processor, but not a person of action. DT does not write “while you OccupyJH clowns keep standing around on the corner, I’ll go occupy Enzi, Barrasso, show you how it’s done. ” No, DT’s gig is to jealously remind the world that she/its power of perception vastly outpaces ours — “why are you giving ink to OccupyJH when I’m the genius here?” — and she/it thinks that you do this by going on the internet and pointing out that other people are doing it wrong.
— dswift