Occupy America

The Occupy Wall Street etc. demonstrations continue to get a lot of attention, notably from the police.  There's an overnight story about police violence in Boston.  Police in Seattle gave costly tickets to motorists who were beeping their horns in support of demonstrators there.  So far all the violence has come from the police, perhaps aided by admitted Rabid Right infiltrators.

There are also the familiar right wing charges--GOPer leaders, Rove, Gland Beck who warns demonstrators are out to kill him--and one of my old favorites, charges that the demonstrators are puppets of the Communist Party, made on Fox News.  But demonstrators have been giving as well as they get from Fox, including greeting Heraldo with chants of Fox Lies!  

Nobody really knows where this is all going yet, except the demonstrations themselves will get bigger for awhile--probably at least until a massive one in Washington.  Andrew Sullivan is monitoring the deep thoughts on the subject, of which I frankly have none.  But you combine this with the GOPer refusal to deal with the American Jobs Act in Congress and its bizarre roster of presidential candidates, and what's happening in the states (as in the post below)--there's unknowable potential.

This movement so far seems stuck with the name "Occupy..." which is an action or a tactic, not an organizational name. But it's got interesting resonances.  Historically of course, to the occupying of buildings etc. in various 60s protests (which came out of earlier sit-ins and strikes) but also to the word itself--an occupation being another name for a job, for what you do, which gives people so much of their identity in this time and place.  So a lot of people don't have occupations, and fear they won't have one in the near future.  This is what occupies them now, and that's always the plutocratic fear, that unemployment leaves people unoccupied, with the time, energy and motivation to occupy themselves by making trouble for the plutocracy. 

There's the 99%, which is a more potent label.  More than enough, you'd think, to occupy America.