An Occupy group during the daytime about a week and a half ago
Two people from an Occupy group preparing to walk to DC two days ago
Dear friends and readers,
In keeping with the ethos of OWS, this is a developing blog. It is not a finished blog. I await other thoughts from other people in the comments.
I’ve been talking/writing with someone oflist about Jane Austen and the Occupy movement and funnily enough, I found to try to express what my sense of what she might have thought of it, clarified to me aspects of it.
So, If Austen thought the Occupy movement like the French revolution I imagine she’d have hated and feared it. Her sister-in-law’s husband guillotined; her whole family dependent on and manipulating and sychophantic before the ancien regime patronage system.
But OWS is not like the French revolution at its start. It grows out of a 20th century idea about the effectiveness of non-violent civil disobedience, which if it did seem to work sometimes no longer is working (I see “seem” because remember MLK was murdered with impunity). We see that on TV in the last week everywhere (including outside the US — take a look at the Egyptian riots, where the horror tear gass is supplied by the US gov’t and the US gov’t gives a huge amount to the Egyptian gov’t).
I kind of think that were Austen to understand that this Occupy movement is not like the French revolution, and were we to explain to her what is meant by non-violent civil disobedience and how it’s manipulated through the media (both would take a lot of history and understanding of nationalism and colonialism and public media in the early to mid-20th century), and we could get her to see this, she might see the movement as what it is fundamentally — or primitively — starving poor people living out in the cold in tents, revealing to the world their state of need, and standing for the 99%. If she could get that, she would shudder as her family and she kept a strong carapace as essential to gaining respectability, and whatever people say on the Net, I’ve learned face-to-face no one shows themselves really in need, it’s not socially acceptable, and people face-to-face at meetings keep their distance from this movement. Austen’s whole family was into protecting themselves, maintaining outward respectability in order to get what they could wrest from the world. ON that level she might have turned away from Occupy which is not about respectability but need, open vulnerable need. Jane Fairfax can’t stand when Miss Bates reveals their desperate shifts.
It’s something new, a new kind of unacknowledged despair, a new way to try to make a political statement, a reaction to the lack of political power most of us now have (the vote is nullified several times over). Unions destroyed in most places. The OWS people thought they could shame the powerful; that doesn’t work anymore. Non-violence is now meant shamelessly with brutal violence and on TV. That woman Chancellor was defiant — you cannot shame her. Listen to the sound of her heels. She won’t resign. Her salary alone brings her $400,000. She is a flunky (Carlyle’s term) of the 10% (it’s not 1%, more like 10).
OWS not a party movement, no leaders, and yet it’s not anarchical, Indeed they were very orderly at Zuccotti, that was part of the surprise. it’s being called Anarchy to bad-mouth it, but it’s not that either.
But Gandhi’s technique is obsolete. See Under the Sign of Sylvia: The Occupy Movement: What We Are Being Taught (especially Bill Moyers’ essay: How Wall Street has Occupied America).
Zuccotti Park destroyed
The politically powerful in the US now control the airwaves, they have hijacked education for several decades, so the understanding of what we see as information is utterly skewed (it’s nothing to tell the most egregious lies on the “news”). Since this is still partly a Trollope list I’ll hazard this on Trollope: from his New Zealander we see he understands most gov’ts to be oligarchies backed by military power used ruthlessly. He would not have understand how Gandhi could get away with his astute manipulations of non-violence and simply not been surprized when the paramilitary police came out in the dead of the night with the law and gov’t to back them up. He says the vote is a small part of liberty and would understand people getting together, but not this way, not in poverty and not through doing deals through individuals. He might have thought of them as partly naive:
Characteristic sign
Trollope’s world was crony capitalism and before any of the social ameliorations set up by gov’ts began in the first decade of the 19th century.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 