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Shhhh…you’re scaring the straights…

I was going for stink lines and flies, but I think I ended up with “smoldering tire fire struck by plague of locusts.” Oh well. Don Martin I ain’t.

Anyhoo, now is probably a good time to remember that most everything you’ve read about the politics of the Sixties/Seventies was written by someone who was there, in the streets, possibly wearing a giant papier-mâché puppet head. Someone who LOVED it. Who looks back at the period as the high point of his/her miserable life. (High point. Heh).

I was ten in 1970 and experienced the era as a giant national everything-lurching-out-of-control. I remember the Kent State shootings, and was most surprised to read this in the Telegraph today:

Shockingly, the public had little sympathy. A Gallup poll found that 58 percent blamed the students for the deaths, 11 percent blamed the National Guard and 31 percent expressed no opinion.

Would you have guessed that was the reaction? The writer adds that two years later, Nixon was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in election history. American politics didn’t actually lurch left until a few of those hippies got a haircut, put on a suit and ran for office. The normos — the people who get up and drop the kids off at school and go to jobs — they don’t really cotton to this violent street theater shit.

So to the peoples of Occupy Wall Street, I say — carry on, chaps! Don’t lose heart now!

Comments


Comment from Mono The Elderish
Time: October 11, 2011, 10:21 pm

I’m getting more of a “New York is burning while giant space spiders from hell rain down on the populace” Vibe.

I could do without the whole protest thing. I’m stuck in between 4 of the damn “Occupy” things within about 100 miles or less. Not very traffic friendly these things. And they make everything smell like Hippie shit.

But nothing galvanizes the populace like potential rioting. I’m willing to stand all this B/S if it helps to make things better.


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: October 11, 2011, 10:23 pm

Yes, Carry on Chaps! That $8.75 an hour that you are being offered to protest (in New York City) may actually pay off your Starbucks tab someday!!!

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/10/political-party-paying-occupy-wall-street-protesters/


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: October 11, 2011, 10:24 pm

Mono – Given the particulars of the crowd, I was actually thinking Crotch-Lice……


Comment from Oldcat
Time: October 11, 2011, 10:27 pm

I remember that – and I was in Ohio, too.

And it’s hard to call this a protest – even the usual leftist lame protest with puppets has a point to it, if a stupid one. This is just ‘look at me, I’m pathetic, nobody loves me!”

Well the last at least is no shock.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: October 11, 2011, 10:44 pm

Yes, I have to admit, being subject to a draft gives you a certain standing in a war debate.

My brother was one of the very last guys called up, by the way. By the time he got out of basic training, it was all over. He spent his tour in Texas learning lapidary.

And the punchline? My brother is such a banana, he insisted on being a conscientious objector anyway. No possibility he’d have to fire a shot at another human being, but he just had to make that point.


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: October 11, 2011, 11:53 pm

Did anyone see that Diane Sawyer has declared that the Occupy Wallstreet protests have spread to “THOUSANDS of Countries”?

Her grade school geography teacher must be spinning in his/her grave…….


Comment from Oceania
Time: October 11, 2011, 11:55 pm

They appear to be the more intelligent of the American Sub-Species.


Comment from Mitchell
Time: October 11, 2011, 11:57 pm

This guy is openly calling for violent “revolution” at Occupy LA. Sounds like he had more than a few supporters. If these clowns do go down this road I don’t think they’ll like where it leads.


Comment from EZnSF
Time: October 12, 2011, 12:00 am

A few days ago OWS/San Fran Chapter posted a bunch of 12×24 posters of that Guy Fawkes mask on several strategic utility boxes and bus stops in downtown. I passed them on my route to work. As of yesterday, each one had gashes and graffiti all over them. As of today, they were all gone.

Which is a shame, cuz I bought a couple sheets of Stoatie’s ‘melting obama’ decals last week(the big ones)and was going to stick them on Guy’s eyes. I even had them in my pocket this morning. Darn. But I’m now prepared. (that and my can of bear spray)


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: October 12, 2011, 12:13 am

I appreciate your custom 🙂


Comment from Nina from GCP
Time: October 12, 2011, 1:21 am

Hey, I WENT to Kent State. So there.

And let me tell you, that shooting is the best thing that happened to that school, it’s given them something to whine about for decades now.


Comment from Oceania
Time: October 12, 2011, 1:42 am

Far be it from me to suggest that We foreigners are instigating Revolution within your own country?

We are certainly teaching you about energy efficiency.

http://www.solardecathlon.gov/


Comment from GregO
Time: October 12, 2011, 2:50 am

A brief vignette of the street scene – just about sums it up.

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4450


Comment from JeffS
Time: October 12, 2011, 4:16 am

Hey, I found where #OccupyWallStreet and Oceania intersect!


Comment from Oceania
Time: October 12, 2011, 4:17 am

Dirty Hippies.


Comment from MIke C.
Time: October 12, 2011, 6:18 am

The whole thing reminds me of Woodstock II – absolutely pathetic.

Look, kids, you missed it (the real deal.) You weren’t there. Get over it and move on. Go back to school and finish up that MA in Maya Angelou.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: October 12, 2011, 8:47 am

That was hilarious, GregO.


Comment from f3ba
Time: October 12, 2011, 11:37 am

Been deployed for quite a while now, and have been watching events unfold from afar.

I gotta tell you, I have had a helluva time figuring out what, exactly, they are all protesting about. The more I read and find out, the funnier it gets.


Comment from Ric Locke
Time: October 12, 2011, 12:02 pm

Yes, f3ba, it’s probably puzzling if all you have to go by is media reports, but in reality it’s quite simple.

They claim to be protesting “big finance”. What really has them irked is that they borrowed a lot of money and spent it on 21st-Century equivalents of frat parties, and now (horror of horrors) “big finance” wants them to pay the loans back. Since nothing they used the money for has any possibility of providing the funds for repayment, it looks easier to eliminate the creditors. Of course there are details and ramifications, but that’s the core issue.

Regards,
Ric


Comment from Deborah
Time: October 12, 2011, 12:07 pm

@f3ba—All you have to do is listen for the phrase, “social justice.” That’s liberal code-speak for the less attractive phrase—“income redistribution,” which is another way of saying I want what you have, but I don’t want to work for it.

And when you come home, and use your G.I. Bill benefits, someone will no doubt say to you that’s its soooo unfair that you can to go to college “for free.”


Comment from Ric Locke
Time: October 12, 2011, 1:58 pm

Actually, Deborah, it’s more extensive than that, and funnier, for sufficiently ironic values of “funny”.

Marx’s complaint was that the workers weren’t getting their fair share of the wealth being generated by the early stages of industrialization. Contemporary capitalists, the people ol’ Karl was railing against, argued that the facilities they provided — factories, tools, &ct. — were absolutely necessary in order for workers to be productive at all, and that they were therefore entitled to the lion’s share of the profits. It is precisely that attitude that the “labor theory of value” was intended to address.

Fast forward to the modern day, in which soi-disant “leftists” argue that the infrastructure built by previous generations (which they are careful not to call “capital assets”, although that’s what they are) is such an important contribution that producers are entitled to only a minuscule share of their produce (cf. Elizabeth Warren’s speech). In a bit under two centuries, the supposed Left has totally inverted the philosophy of its founder, and rephrased the arguments of his greatest enemies to use Marx’s words!

On top of that, we have “positive rights”, which deny any share to the producer — if there is a “right to nutrition” the producer of food has no right to the fruit of his labor. Is it not delicious?

Regards,
Ric


Comment from Dawn
Time: October 12, 2011, 3:50 pm

Anti war is no longer fashionable?


Comment from JuliaM
Time: October 12, 2011, 5:07 pm

Oh, damn, we have to import every new fad from the States, don’t we? 🙁

I liked it better when we just got Coca-Cola, nylon stockings and ‘Dallas’…


Comment from nightfly
Time: October 12, 2011, 5:23 pm

I love the p-shop. It looks like the whole movement piled out of the back of Spicoli’s van like a clown-car. Appropriate on many levels.


Comment from Oceania
Time: October 13, 2011, 5:17 am

Actually I could flay some of them alive – they would make lovely Lampshades!


Comment from Oceania
Time: October 13, 2011, 5:30 am

Actually … it won’t be long before these Sub-Human vermin start chanting:

“We have same sex marriages!
It is ok to perform same sex love!
It is OK to have sex with animals!
It is ok to sodomise children!”

You Americans are a sick bunch …


Comment from Christopher Taylor
Time: October 16, 2011, 12:25 am

If you learn the real story behind the Kent State shootings, you learn the students were more to blame than you’d think. They spent half a week tearing the school apart, lighting things on fire, and throwing things at the cops. That’s why the national guardsmen were there to begin with.

And if you listen to the audio you can hear a pistol shot go off before the national guard opened up. The students were chanting “kill! kill!” at the guardsmen. That doesn’t justify their reaction but it does make more sense of it than “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming.”

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