As regards OWS, and the Bloombergian response, I don't have much to say, except that I think it better that in times like this a blogger's mouth be silent -- for in truth we have no gift to set a movement right.
I don't think, for instance, Matt Yglesias is wrong that if you tot up the scorecard, OWS made out OK by provoking the draconian response of yesterday morning. Yglesias is probably right!
But then, if you'd asked Yglesias before the event whether or not OWS was a good idea, I doubt he'd have said "dooo it."
And I might not have either. I don't talk about it here very much, but I am an academic, and I'll cop to an academic sensibility: cool detachment, juggling different points of view, careful contextualization: I like these things. And they are good things!
But one lesson I learned hard during the hideous years of 2001-2002 was that this sort of levelheaded analysis was utterly inadequate in the face of determined political nutfuckery.
In the light of, say, what Will says here, I have to point out -- and this applies to myself, too -- that it was not polite, thoughtful bloggers, even the ones who say "fuck," who made the deathy serious issue of income inequality something that the Serious People even bother to talk about. It took some smelly hippies a lot of yelling and getting smelly to do this.
So a little fucking humility, please.
The one thing the OWS protesters did was to put their asses on the line, risking arrest and other crap in order to make a political point.
What,then, you don't even hesitate before opining about what you think they should do, when you have not done what they did? When they have accomplished more through a willingness to stink in public than you ever did by examining flowcharts?
Christ I wish we'd thought of the OWS strategy of just sitting and stinking in 2002. Marching then always seemed so... cathartic, for that day, but the next day, pointless. Maybe we'd have cut short the war by a few years?
Whatever. My overall point is that history is a useful guide for historians, but the principal actors in successful political movements rarely ever say "thank the Gods, disinterested academics offered us their wisdom."
Academics can do the post-mortems. Leave the rest to the freaks.
In the meantime, HAMMER THE SHIT ABOUT THE NASTY MEDIA BLACKOUT, THE ARRESTS OF JOURNALISTS, and the OVERALL BRUTALITY.
Like, cover the news?