UltimateHoboW/Shotgun
10-11-2011, 07:56 PM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/eyewitness-history_595200.html
It is Day 18 when I arrive at the Occupy Wall Street protests. When dealing with antiestablishment types, I like to let them get established. It seems only sporting, since the early moments of any order-changing upheaval can look like utter chaos. But being slow off the mark might have cost me. For by the time I get to lower Manhattan, The Revolution has been going on so long that the revolutionaries have already started selling out.
When I arrive at Occupy Wall Street (OWS) ground zero at Zuccotti Park, only a few blocks over from the World Trade Center ground zero, the first revolutionaries I encounter are two masked-up anarchists named Spooky and Newport. They wear studded leather jackets which bear hand-painted inscriptions like “Fight War, Not Wars” and are clad in black from head to toe. Except Newport additionally sports a chartreuse fright wig and sunglasses with reflecting marijuana leaves on the lenses. They seem to know they’re a spectacle, since they stand in front of a cardboard sign that reads “Pictures for change or a dollar.” Meaning the passing fanny-packing tourist hordes or smirking financial sector barbarians can get their snaps taken with Spooky and Newport as if they were mascots at Disney’s new Protester World Experience.
I point out that they are exploitative capitalists, no better than the greedy little gunsels at Goldman Sachs whose heads we’d like to microwave in order to feed their plump flesh to those who are hungry for change. Either you’re part of the solution, or part of the problem. You’re either part of “us,” the “99 percent” (as all the surrounding signage identifies us), or you’re part of “them”—the rapacious 1 percent, who are purportedly strangling our nation by holding roughly one-third of its wealth, even if they also pay 38 percent of all federal income taxes while the bottom 47 percent of the population pay nothing (a Revolution is no place for facts and figures).
Spooky is apologetic. “We’re travelers, we’ve got to capitalize on the whole thing,” he admits. “A lot of these guys are taking advantage of the situation.” Including him, I suggest. “Exactly,” he smiles. Or at least I think he smiles, since he won’t unmask. “I ain’t gonna lie about it. I’m homeless. I’m gonna take advantage of something like this. Not gonna pretend like I’m some huge political rocker ‘f— the government!’ when I know I’m not.” Don’t get Spooky wrong, he does believe in “f— the government,” he hastens to add, since he is, after all, an anarchist. “But I’ve already had a few people tell me this is a homeless man’s dream camp.”
Now that the protesters have hijacked headlines, impressing every leftoid from Susan Sarandon (who came down to the demonstration to be “educated”) to the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, who went so far as to Tweet that this reminded him of Tahrir Square in Cairo, all the spoils of war are pouring in, from comestibles to cold hard cash. “You get all the food you want, you get all the clothes you want. These gloves, this scarf, and all this sh—? I got it all from here,” Spooky brags.
Spooky wishes he had a sob story to tell me about how he lost his gig in the Great Recession from bubble-bursting credit default swaps. Many Wall Streeters inarguably were ethically challenged plunderers, doing their fair share to help turn the American Dream into a waking nightmare (along with profligate government spenders, promiscuous lending institutions, and gluttonous consumers who were all too happy to buy high six- and seven-figure homes on five-figure salaries, slopping at the trough of easy credit and no-doc loans). But in the Great Rewrite that has followed the Great Recession, it has now become fashionable to blame Wall Street for everything from your dog getting hit by a car to your wife getting cellulite on her thighs.
Spooky, however, can’t really blame Wall Street for his living conditions. He’s homeless by choice, and is up from Orlando so that he can see “a real city.” In Orlando, he says, “It sucks to spange—that’s a hippie word [meaning to panhandle],” he explains. There, city ordinances make you do so while standing within preordained dotted lines on the ground. “Nobody gives you any money there, because they’re all money-grubbing Wall Street wannabes.”
Since the protesters promise to go on indefinitely, with the movement having spread to hundreds of other cities, he figures he’ll hang out here until first snow. Then he’ll probably winter some place southerly. Then he’ll come back. When I tell Spooky this sounds more like work than a job—why not just get one—he winces. “I like to come and go with no set time or schedule. I don’t even know what day it is.”
Besides, he likes it here. When not sleeping in the park with the others, he can go catch z’s at this all-night bar in Brooklyn, where he also checks his email and catches up with the virtual Revolution. Between all the Tweeting and blogging and livestreaming, it almost feels like you’re missing something if you’re actually here. For instance, at the park, the only musical entertainment I get is a few bad lute players and a constant band of drum circlers (one lets me sit in on conga, so that I can feel the very heartbeat of the movement). Whereas back home, I could watch Peter Yarrow get livestreamed while singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” during his visit to the Protester World Experience—with special lyrics about pirates actually being stock traders. Peter Yarrow! Of Peter, Paul and Mary! It’s like old times. Better than old times, since you can now get blown by the Winds of Change without even leaving the house.
If you want to actually see and hear the Revolution, the worst place to be is at it. (Though if you want to smell it—with no available showers, the park reeks of stale sweat socks and hummus gone bad—then you’re better off on the ground.) There’s even a “media center” in the square, where all the OWS revolutionaries sit at laptops, their nest of wires covered by tarps, so that they don’t miss a thing. Though sometimes the technology can feel invasive.
The reason Spooky won’t remove his mask, he tells me, isn’t that he’s being a good anarchist or that he plans to break windows at Bank of America across the street, though maybe he should, as they’ve just imposed new $5 fees for debit-card transactions. It’s all these damn Tweeting, livestreaming stalkarazzi. “I don’t want to get my face posted on Twitter,” he says. “I don’t like bad PR.”
Like most trouble in the world, this trouble started with Canadians. Specifically, the Vancouver-based anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters, which launched the initial call for protest in July. The protests began in mid-September, then for the most part organically mushroomed, picking up along the way the usual suspects: Anonymous hacktivists, Michael Moore, the Service Employees International Union. Adbusters is also responsible for headline-generating gimmickry such as “Buy Nothing Day,” “TV Turnoff Week,” and “mental environmentalism”—which sources close to Wikipedia tell me holds that “our minds can be polluted by infotoxins.”
After reading Occupy Wall Street’s literature, which could make Karl Marx want to become a hedge fund manager, I’m starting to think Adbusters was onto something on that last count. What exactly the OWS movement wants has been the source of great puzzlement. With all their talk of being nonhierarchal and having no official spokespeople, it’s difficult to get straight answers. Aside from the disparate responses I get from nearly every single person I ask (they want a millionaire’s tax, an end to capital punishment, modernized infrastructure, and so on), a single placard I see at the activists’ encampment perfectly illustrates the grab-bagginess of it all: “Close Corporate Tax Loopholes, Tax Religious Groups, End the Wars, Legalize Weed, and Bring Back Arrested Development.”
But on one of OWS’s many affinity-group websites, they did take a stab at quasi-officially listing their grievances. Get a snack. This will take a while. They are gathering, they say, to “express a feeling of mass injustice” on behalf of “all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world.” They are against corporations, which have not only taken your houses “through an illegal foreclosure process” and taken “bailouts from taxpayers with impunity,” but also “perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”
Corporations have additionally poisoned the food supply through negligence, profited off the torture of animals, held students hostage with college-loan debts, sold our privacy as a commodity, used the military to prevent freedom of the press, outsourced labor, blocked alternative sources of energy, covered up oil spills, kept people misinformed by controlling the media, created weapons of mass destruction to get government contracts, and perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad while participating in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
My recounting, mind you, does not duplicate their entire list. And even if it did, their entire list keeps its options open with a footnote specifying that “these grievances are not all-inclusive.” So what do they want? Besides, seemingly, to complain a lot about corporations, the very entities that provide so many of the jobs that our economy is sorely in need of? What are they advocating, besides their right to assemble publicly for the purposes of bucket-drumming and eating vegan quiche in the free chow line? Well, according to another posting on OWS’s website, they want a universal single-payer health care system, a guaranteed living wage regardless of employment, free college education, one trillion dollars in infrastructure improvement, to bring the fossil-fuel economy to an end, to outlaw all credit-reporting agencies, and to see immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness for all. This is just a partial list, but they’re also going to be needing unlimited open-borders migration, too, since “these demands will create so many jobs, it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.”
But wait! Above that original posting is now an administrative note saying this is “not an official list of demands.” It is a forum post submitted by a single contributor and “hyped by irresponsible news/commentary agencies like Fox News.” It’s never been proposed or agreed to “on a consensus basis” by the OWS movement, so “there is NO official list of demands.”
Which brings us back to square one. Whether OWS just wants to end corporate welfare and protect workers’ rights, or whether they want the roads paved in gumdrops and to see every American entitled to a backrub from Sofía Vergara, they’re not interested in officially saying. To borrow from the old protest-march chestnut—What do we want? (We’re not gonna tell!) When do we want it? (Now!)
Back at the OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park, it’s a hygienic disaster area: greasy hair, stained shirts, crusted trousers—and that’s just the journalists. There seems to be one reporter on the ground for every 10 to 15 activists. The encampment is divided into sections—media, kitchen, medical, sign-making, comfort station, meditation circle, musical entertainment. There’s even a People’s Library whose offerings are lent on the honor system with no due dates—a VHS tape of The Who’s rock opera Tommy and books with enticing titles like White Racism: The Basics, Since Predator Came: Notes from the Struggle for American Indian Liberation, and HOMOTHUG: The Secret Life of Rudy Giuliani.
Between all these sections are the bodies of lazing activists strewn about, often resting in dank sleeping bags stuffed under tarps. The one thing missing—besides shelter—are restrooms. Since I’m trying to stay hydrated while overthrowing Wall Street and have had about three Diet Cokes to that end, I’m about due. Luckily, I run into a helpful lass named Amy just as I’m about to look for a street grate for relief.
A twentysomething (about three-fifths of the activists seem to be twentysomethings) who is sausaged into a pink sweater and short leopard-print skirt, Amy is giving the business to the facilitator of the Internet working group I’m monitoring. She doesn’t like that they have “male” and “female” designations on their website in order to keep statistics. Amy is calling for the “very abolition of gender,” and she’d like her concern brought up in group.
I ask her if she doesn’t believe in gender, then which restroom does she use, and by the way, does she know where I can find one? She says at “The People’s McDonald’s” across the street on Broadway (the usually heartless multinational corporation has been kind enough to let all OWS comers use the facilities without having to purchase Quarter Pounders), she uses the “women’s room—since I identify as a woman.” She “doesn’t want to sh— on McDonald’s,” with them being so good to OWS. Though “I go into the men’s room at Burger King,” she adds defiantly, “because the line is always shorter.”
After clearing the men’s room line of 15 or so at The People’s McDonald’s, I spy a black man in monochrome leather garb. He wears a burgundy leather jacket, burgundy leather pants, a burgundy leather sweater, and a burgundy belt and shoes. He makes me nostalgic, reminding me of the interior of a 1975 Chrysler Cordoba. It would seem a sin not to compliment him on his finery. So I do.
“Why, thank you,” he says appreciatively. “It’s my style, you know.” His name is David Lawrence Harvey, and after assuring me that he’s not one of the OWS crowd, he reveals his true business: passing out fliers advertising the Private Eyes Gentleman’s Club on West 45th, with an admission pass that would entitle me not only to see naked ladies who are less fussy about their gender-identification than my friend Amy is, but also to enjoy a complimentary buffet luncheon.
Harvey doesn’t quite understand what’s going on across the street. In theory, he’s sympathetic to their aims, whatever they are. “But it looks like a party to me,” he says. “I’m not judging anybody by the way they dress,” he says, pointing to his own attire. “But all I see is young, unemployed people.” It’s fine for them to dream. “I dream, I love to dream—on my way to work,” he says. Harvey, too, has other ambitions besides just passing out fliers to gentlemen’s clubs. He plays music and tells me to check out his YouTube page. He even wrote a love song for Michelle Obama.
What he doesn’t understand, however, is all the anger and class resentment OWSers have against people who have more than they do. “Everybody can’t be a millionaire,” says Harvey. “I understand [some people] have all that wealth. But why you gonna waste your life worryin’ about that? Complain all you want—but on your way to work.”
Harvey’s not the only person I meet who resents his new neighbors, many of whom seem to have been documentary film studies majors in college, and some of whom tell me they even quit their jobs to join the movement, perhaps jumping one step ahead of the New Joblessness that’s currently dogging America. (Why wait for misfortune to overtake you tomorrow, when you can embrace misery today?) Around the perimeter of the park sit a lot of food trucks—serving hot dogs, falafels, and more.
Manning one smoothie cart is a Chinese immigrant named Zhi. I ask Zhi how’s business. I figure with all the increased traffic, he must be doing gangbusters. But he shakes his head in frustration, pointing to the square’s new inhabitants. In broken English, he tells me he used to make a couple hundred dollars a day. Now, he’s lucky if he makes a little over $100. “People used to come down here for lunch. The money type—they buy food. Smoothie. But right now [with all the donated food coming in each day including pizza and chicken wings] everything free.”
Likewise, several construction workers are grumpily smoking Marlboros while sitting on a wall within ear-splitting distance of the bucket-drum brigade. In the now-crowded park, they’re the only seats available. The workers are on lunch break from putting up Tower 4 of the new World Trade Center across the street. I approach one, a member of a Steamfitters local who has a sticker on his hard hat that reads “Mosque Ground Zero” with a hash mark through it. When asked his name, he responds, “You can call me ‘Pissed Off.’ ”
“Can you tell them to stop playin’ the f—in’ drums during lunch?” he bellows. “Stop with the drums! Three weeks we have to hear it. We do construction. We hear loud noises all day. All’s we wanna do is come down and enjoy our lunch. If they support us—[multiple unions, perhaps jonesing for action after their Wisconsin battles, have now found common cause with the protesters]—they’d give us a break during our lunch hour.”
I ask Pissed Off where he normally eats. He points to a table in the center of the square that is now completely covered with protester paraphernalia. “If they had one thing to protest, fine,” says P.O.ed. “But it seems anybody and everybody can come down here and vent. Gimme something to support! I can’t support the 25 different things they’re protesting. Don’t get me going—I’m having a bad day.”
Not all of the protesters, however, even support what P.O.ed and his Steamfitter pals are doing. Why put up another tower when the government will just knock it down again? This I hear from Nick Long, who mans the Nick@Nite cigarette-rolling station, where he rolls thousands of free cigarettes for his OWS comrades using donated tobacco and rolling papers. (Drugs and alcohol are frowned upon in the park, as the protesters don’t want to draw more attention from the police, with whom they’ve already had several clashes. Making this a lot like Woodstock, without all the sex, good music, and fun.)
Nick, a nice Italian kid, likes his new digs, even if his mom complained when she saw him on TV and berated him for “sleeping in the park” with “all those losers.” Having rolled 7,000 or so cigarettes, he clearly believes in the power of nicotine, but doesn’t believe in much else. He says, “I hate all governments, I want people surviving on their own.” With that kind of talk, at first I take him for a breakaway Tea Partier, but he says he’s an anarchist. I ask him if he’s anti-U.S.A. “I’m pretty much anti-every country,” he says. “Because every country is a bunch of murderers, you gotta think. I’ve watched those 9/11 videos. Those planes didn’t make the towers fall down.”
We look over at the Steamfitters’ tower—Tower 4. I ask him when he thinks the U.S. government will take that one down. “When they get enough people in it,” he says. “I think that’s their way of population control.”
Movement types will doubtless accuse me of cherry-picking protesters. But during my two days in the park, I have every variety of nutcake conspiracy theory pushed my way, up to and including Wall Street having created communism and the American Zionist Council assassinating JFK. But don’t take my word for it. New York magazine went to the trouble of surveying 100 protesters whom they identified as being “in it for the long haul.”
:strong:
It is Day 18 when I arrive at the Occupy Wall Street protests. When dealing with antiestablishment types, I like to let them get established. It seems only sporting, since the early moments of any order-changing upheaval can look like utter chaos. But being slow off the mark might have cost me. For by the time I get to lower Manhattan, The Revolution has been going on so long that the revolutionaries have already started selling out.
When I arrive at Occupy Wall Street (OWS) ground zero at Zuccotti Park, only a few blocks over from the World Trade Center ground zero, the first revolutionaries I encounter are two masked-up anarchists named Spooky and Newport. They wear studded leather jackets which bear hand-painted inscriptions like “Fight War, Not Wars” and are clad in black from head to toe. Except Newport additionally sports a chartreuse fright wig and sunglasses with reflecting marijuana leaves on the lenses. They seem to know they’re a spectacle, since they stand in front of a cardboard sign that reads “Pictures for change or a dollar.” Meaning the passing fanny-packing tourist hordes or smirking financial sector barbarians can get their snaps taken with Spooky and Newport as if they were mascots at Disney’s new Protester World Experience.
I point out that they are exploitative capitalists, no better than the greedy little gunsels at Goldman Sachs whose heads we’d like to microwave in order to feed their plump flesh to those who are hungry for change. Either you’re part of the solution, or part of the problem. You’re either part of “us,” the “99 percent” (as all the surrounding signage identifies us), or you’re part of “them”—the rapacious 1 percent, who are purportedly strangling our nation by holding roughly one-third of its wealth, even if they also pay 38 percent of all federal income taxes while the bottom 47 percent of the population pay nothing (a Revolution is no place for facts and figures).
Spooky is apologetic. “We’re travelers, we’ve got to capitalize on the whole thing,” he admits. “A lot of these guys are taking advantage of the situation.” Including him, I suggest. “Exactly,” he smiles. Or at least I think he smiles, since he won’t unmask. “I ain’t gonna lie about it. I’m homeless. I’m gonna take advantage of something like this. Not gonna pretend like I’m some huge political rocker ‘f— the government!’ when I know I’m not.” Don’t get Spooky wrong, he does believe in “f— the government,” he hastens to add, since he is, after all, an anarchist. “But I’ve already had a few people tell me this is a homeless man’s dream camp.”
Now that the protesters have hijacked headlines, impressing every leftoid from Susan Sarandon (who came down to the demonstration to be “educated”) to the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, who went so far as to Tweet that this reminded him of Tahrir Square in Cairo, all the spoils of war are pouring in, from comestibles to cold hard cash. “You get all the food you want, you get all the clothes you want. These gloves, this scarf, and all this sh—? I got it all from here,” Spooky brags.
Spooky wishes he had a sob story to tell me about how he lost his gig in the Great Recession from bubble-bursting credit default swaps. Many Wall Streeters inarguably were ethically challenged plunderers, doing their fair share to help turn the American Dream into a waking nightmare (along with profligate government spenders, promiscuous lending institutions, and gluttonous consumers who were all too happy to buy high six- and seven-figure homes on five-figure salaries, slopping at the trough of easy credit and no-doc loans). But in the Great Rewrite that has followed the Great Recession, it has now become fashionable to blame Wall Street for everything from your dog getting hit by a car to your wife getting cellulite on her thighs.
Spooky, however, can’t really blame Wall Street for his living conditions. He’s homeless by choice, and is up from Orlando so that he can see “a real city.” In Orlando, he says, “It sucks to spange—that’s a hippie word [meaning to panhandle],” he explains. There, city ordinances make you do so while standing within preordained dotted lines on the ground. “Nobody gives you any money there, because they’re all money-grubbing Wall Street wannabes.”
Since the protesters promise to go on indefinitely, with the movement having spread to hundreds of other cities, he figures he’ll hang out here until first snow. Then he’ll probably winter some place southerly. Then he’ll come back. When I tell Spooky this sounds more like work than a job—why not just get one—he winces. “I like to come and go with no set time or schedule. I don’t even know what day it is.”
Besides, he likes it here. When not sleeping in the park with the others, he can go catch z’s at this all-night bar in Brooklyn, where he also checks his email and catches up with the virtual Revolution. Between all the Tweeting and blogging and livestreaming, it almost feels like you’re missing something if you’re actually here. For instance, at the park, the only musical entertainment I get is a few bad lute players and a constant band of drum circlers (one lets me sit in on conga, so that I can feel the very heartbeat of the movement). Whereas back home, I could watch Peter Yarrow get livestreamed while singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” during his visit to the Protester World Experience—with special lyrics about pirates actually being stock traders. Peter Yarrow! Of Peter, Paul and Mary! It’s like old times. Better than old times, since you can now get blown by the Winds of Change without even leaving the house.
If you want to actually see and hear the Revolution, the worst place to be is at it. (Though if you want to smell it—with no available showers, the park reeks of stale sweat socks and hummus gone bad—then you’re better off on the ground.) There’s even a “media center” in the square, where all the OWS revolutionaries sit at laptops, their nest of wires covered by tarps, so that they don’t miss a thing. Though sometimes the technology can feel invasive.
The reason Spooky won’t remove his mask, he tells me, isn’t that he’s being a good anarchist or that he plans to break windows at Bank of America across the street, though maybe he should, as they’ve just imposed new $5 fees for debit-card transactions. It’s all these damn Tweeting, livestreaming stalkarazzi. “I don’t want to get my face posted on Twitter,” he says. “I don’t like bad PR.”
Like most trouble in the world, this trouble started with Canadians. Specifically, the Vancouver-based anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters, which launched the initial call for protest in July. The protests began in mid-September, then for the most part organically mushroomed, picking up along the way the usual suspects: Anonymous hacktivists, Michael Moore, the Service Employees International Union. Adbusters is also responsible for headline-generating gimmickry such as “Buy Nothing Day,” “TV Turnoff Week,” and “mental environmentalism”—which sources close to Wikipedia tell me holds that “our minds can be polluted by infotoxins.”
After reading Occupy Wall Street’s literature, which could make Karl Marx want to become a hedge fund manager, I’m starting to think Adbusters was onto something on that last count. What exactly the OWS movement wants has been the source of great puzzlement. With all their talk of being nonhierarchal and having no official spokespeople, it’s difficult to get straight answers. Aside from the disparate responses I get from nearly every single person I ask (they want a millionaire’s tax, an end to capital punishment, modernized infrastructure, and so on), a single placard I see at the activists’ encampment perfectly illustrates the grab-bagginess of it all: “Close Corporate Tax Loopholes, Tax Religious Groups, End the Wars, Legalize Weed, and Bring Back Arrested Development.”
But on one of OWS’s many affinity-group websites, they did take a stab at quasi-officially listing their grievances. Get a snack. This will take a while. They are gathering, they say, to “express a feeling of mass injustice” on behalf of “all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world.” They are against corporations, which have not only taken your houses “through an illegal foreclosure process” and taken “bailouts from taxpayers with impunity,” but also “perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”
Corporations have additionally poisoned the food supply through negligence, profited off the torture of animals, held students hostage with college-loan debts, sold our privacy as a commodity, used the military to prevent freedom of the press, outsourced labor, blocked alternative sources of energy, covered up oil spills, kept people misinformed by controlling the media, created weapons of mass destruction to get government contracts, and perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad while participating in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
My recounting, mind you, does not duplicate their entire list. And even if it did, their entire list keeps its options open with a footnote specifying that “these grievances are not all-inclusive.” So what do they want? Besides, seemingly, to complain a lot about corporations, the very entities that provide so many of the jobs that our economy is sorely in need of? What are they advocating, besides their right to assemble publicly for the purposes of bucket-drumming and eating vegan quiche in the free chow line? Well, according to another posting on OWS’s website, they want a universal single-payer health care system, a guaranteed living wage regardless of employment, free college education, one trillion dollars in infrastructure improvement, to bring the fossil-fuel economy to an end, to outlaw all credit-reporting agencies, and to see immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness for all. This is just a partial list, but they’re also going to be needing unlimited open-borders migration, too, since “these demands will create so many jobs, it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.”
But wait! Above that original posting is now an administrative note saying this is “not an official list of demands.” It is a forum post submitted by a single contributor and “hyped by irresponsible news/commentary agencies like Fox News.” It’s never been proposed or agreed to “on a consensus basis” by the OWS movement, so “there is NO official list of demands.”
Which brings us back to square one. Whether OWS just wants to end corporate welfare and protect workers’ rights, or whether they want the roads paved in gumdrops and to see every American entitled to a backrub from Sofía Vergara, they’re not interested in officially saying. To borrow from the old protest-march chestnut—What do we want? (We’re not gonna tell!) When do we want it? (Now!)
Back at the OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park, it’s a hygienic disaster area: greasy hair, stained shirts, crusted trousers—and that’s just the journalists. There seems to be one reporter on the ground for every 10 to 15 activists. The encampment is divided into sections—media, kitchen, medical, sign-making, comfort station, meditation circle, musical entertainment. There’s even a People’s Library whose offerings are lent on the honor system with no due dates—a VHS tape of The Who’s rock opera Tommy and books with enticing titles like White Racism: The Basics, Since Predator Came: Notes from the Struggle for American Indian Liberation, and HOMOTHUG: The Secret Life of Rudy Giuliani.
Between all these sections are the bodies of lazing activists strewn about, often resting in dank sleeping bags stuffed under tarps. The one thing missing—besides shelter—are restrooms. Since I’m trying to stay hydrated while overthrowing Wall Street and have had about three Diet Cokes to that end, I’m about due. Luckily, I run into a helpful lass named Amy just as I’m about to look for a street grate for relief.
A twentysomething (about three-fifths of the activists seem to be twentysomethings) who is sausaged into a pink sweater and short leopard-print skirt, Amy is giving the business to the facilitator of the Internet working group I’m monitoring. She doesn’t like that they have “male” and “female” designations on their website in order to keep statistics. Amy is calling for the “very abolition of gender,” and she’d like her concern brought up in group.
I ask her if she doesn’t believe in gender, then which restroom does she use, and by the way, does she know where I can find one? She says at “The People’s McDonald’s” across the street on Broadway (the usually heartless multinational corporation has been kind enough to let all OWS comers use the facilities without having to purchase Quarter Pounders), she uses the “women’s room—since I identify as a woman.” She “doesn’t want to sh— on McDonald’s,” with them being so good to OWS. Though “I go into the men’s room at Burger King,” she adds defiantly, “because the line is always shorter.”
After clearing the men’s room line of 15 or so at The People’s McDonald’s, I spy a black man in monochrome leather garb. He wears a burgundy leather jacket, burgundy leather pants, a burgundy leather sweater, and a burgundy belt and shoes. He makes me nostalgic, reminding me of the interior of a 1975 Chrysler Cordoba. It would seem a sin not to compliment him on his finery. So I do.
“Why, thank you,” he says appreciatively. “It’s my style, you know.” His name is David Lawrence Harvey, and after assuring me that he’s not one of the OWS crowd, he reveals his true business: passing out fliers advertising the Private Eyes Gentleman’s Club on West 45th, with an admission pass that would entitle me not only to see naked ladies who are less fussy about their gender-identification than my friend Amy is, but also to enjoy a complimentary buffet luncheon.
Harvey doesn’t quite understand what’s going on across the street. In theory, he’s sympathetic to their aims, whatever they are. “But it looks like a party to me,” he says. “I’m not judging anybody by the way they dress,” he says, pointing to his own attire. “But all I see is young, unemployed people.” It’s fine for them to dream. “I dream, I love to dream—on my way to work,” he says. Harvey, too, has other ambitions besides just passing out fliers to gentlemen’s clubs. He plays music and tells me to check out his YouTube page. He even wrote a love song for Michelle Obama.
What he doesn’t understand, however, is all the anger and class resentment OWSers have against people who have more than they do. “Everybody can’t be a millionaire,” says Harvey. “I understand [some people] have all that wealth. But why you gonna waste your life worryin’ about that? Complain all you want—but on your way to work.”
Harvey’s not the only person I meet who resents his new neighbors, many of whom seem to have been documentary film studies majors in college, and some of whom tell me they even quit their jobs to join the movement, perhaps jumping one step ahead of the New Joblessness that’s currently dogging America. (Why wait for misfortune to overtake you tomorrow, when you can embrace misery today?) Around the perimeter of the park sit a lot of food trucks—serving hot dogs, falafels, and more.
Manning one smoothie cart is a Chinese immigrant named Zhi. I ask Zhi how’s business. I figure with all the increased traffic, he must be doing gangbusters. But he shakes his head in frustration, pointing to the square’s new inhabitants. In broken English, he tells me he used to make a couple hundred dollars a day. Now, he’s lucky if he makes a little over $100. “People used to come down here for lunch. The money type—they buy food. Smoothie. But right now [with all the donated food coming in each day including pizza and chicken wings] everything free.”
Likewise, several construction workers are grumpily smoking Marlboros while sitting on a wall within ear-splitting distance of the bucket-drum brigade. In the now-crowded park, they’re the only seats available. The workers are on lunch break from putting up Tower 4 of the new World Trade Center across the street. I approach one, a member of a Steamfitters local who has a sticker on his hard hat that reads “Mosque Ground Zero” with a hash mark through it. When asked his name, he responds, “You can call me ‘Pissed Off.’ ”
“Can you tell them to stop playin’ the f—in’ drums during lunch?” he bellows. “Stop with the drums! Three weeks we have to hear it. We do construction. We hear loud noises all day. All’s we wanna do is come down and enjoy our lunch. If they support us—[multiple unions, perhaps jonesing for action after their Wisconsin battles, have now found common cause with the protesters]—they’d give us a break during our lunch hour.”
I ask Pissed Off where he normally eats. He points to a table in the center of the square that is now completely covered with protester paraphernalia. “If they had one thing to protest, fine,” says P.O.ed. “But it seems anybody and everybody can come down here and vent. Gimme something to support! I can’t support the 25 different things they’re protesting. Don’t get me going—I’m having a bad day.”
Not all of the protesters, however, even support what P.O.ed and his Steamfitter pals are doing. Why put up another tower when the government will just knock it down again? This I hear from Nick Long, who mans the Nick@Nite cigarette-rolling station, where he rolls thousands of free cigarettes for his OWS comrades using donated tobacco and rolling papers. (Drugs and alcohol are frowned upon in the park, as the protesters don’t want to draw more attention from the police, with whom they’ve already had several clashes. Making this a lot like Woodstock, without all the sex, good music, and fun.)
Nick, a nice Italian kid, likes his new digs, even if his mom complained when she saw him on TV and berated him for “sleeping in the park” with “all those losers.” Having rolled 7,000 or so cigarettes, he clearly believes in the power of nicotine, but doesn’t believe in much else. He says, “I hate all governments, I want people surviving on their own.” With that kind of talk, at first I take him for a breakaway Tea Partier, but he says he’s an anarchist. I ask him if he’s anti-U.S.A. “I’m pretty much anti-every country,” he says. “Because every country is a bunch of murderers, you gotta think. I’ve watched those 9/11 videos. Those planes didn’t make the towers fall down.”
We look over at the Steamfitters’ tower—Tower 4. I ask him when he thinks the U.S. government will take that one down. “When they get enough people in it,” he says. “I think that’s their way of population control.”
Movement types will doubtless accuse me of cherry-picking protesters. But during my two days in the park, I have every variety of nutcake conspiracy theory pushed my way, up to and including Wall Street having created communism and the American Zionist Council assassinating JFK. But don’t take my word for it. New York magazine went to the trouble of surveying 100 protesters whom they identified as being “in it for the long haul.”
:strong: