Update 10/27: Here's the always keen Dahlia Lithwick with her take:
I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism?
There has been no small amount of criticism of the Occupation Movement that it's not anti-consumerist enough. Because so many people have cell phones, etc. I understand the sentiment, having been an anti-consumerist in my youth. I spent six months hitchhiking from Austin, up to Idaho, went to Haight-Ashbury, down to East L.A., through Phoenix and El Paso before ending up back home. During which time I spent less than ten American dollars. Of course, that was in 1990's dollars and no one minded giving a free ride when gas was cheap. When I was done I could count my ribs, but it didn't kill me.
But anti-consumerism doesn't work as a movement. Once you take yourself that far out of society, an envelope forms around you. You might as well be a monk in the desert.
I remember early on in Austin, I woke up to find the kill-spreeingly famous UT clock tower had broken during the night. Not having any money, I needed to know the time to make it to the east of downtown to Fishes and Loaves. Sitting on the sidewalk, passersby, this should be easy.
"Excuse me, do you know what time it is?"
"I don't have any."
"Say, ma'am do you have the time?"
"I don't have any."
Not only was I not "sparing change" (people are strange, when you're a sp'anger), but passersby couldn't even get the concept that I wasn't! Any lilting from a man on the sidewalk couldn't be anything but begging.
Finally a hipster/dealer walks by and I ask him the time. Without looking he just points at the broken clock tower, like I'm the idiot, and keeps moving.
Or as I like to call it, my Monday night, witnessing the largest mass arrest in the Cradle of Liberty in 43 years. Luckily, I was holding the line along the primary camp that the police wisely chose not to attack.
I finally found a video which captures the spirit of that evening. Sorry, ladies, I'm just off camera for most of the pre-attack part of this vid ;)
