NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
November 19, 2011
The usual demands
Evelyn Waugh, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Or perhaps he is. The English satirical novelist, traveller, and biographer - who to all appearances died in April 1966 - would seem to have resurfaced as the author of various lists of demands from the Occupy Wall Street movement. They are darkly comedic, and when I circulated one "proposed" version found on a New York OWS website, in email, friends quickly pinged back even better examples from the Left Coast.None of these lists is "official" - OWS leaders are already mastering the political art of "deniability" - and yet there is an unmistakable family resemblance from list to list, and considerable overlap. They give the flavour of a movement that was detached at birth from any mothering sense of reality. At one level, here are the orphans of Marxist socialism, wandering the world zombielike, 22 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. Unionize ALL workers immediately. ... Raise the minimum wage immediately to $18/hr. ... Institute a moratorium on all foreclosures and layoffs immediately. ... Open the borders to all immigrants, legal or illegal. ... Tax the very rich at rates up to 90 per cent. ... Allow workers to elect their supervisors. ... Lower the retirement age to 55. Increase Social Security benefits. ... Ban the private ownership of land. ... Immediate debt forgiveness for all. ... Release all political prisoners immediately. ... End the 'War on Drugs'." That was a fairly representative sampling, from a very wide field, across which one might reply to every single demand, "You and whose army?" For, after all, the encampment in Zuccotti Park was unable to defeat even New York City bylaws. Waugh's gift was for the reductio ad absurdum; to take quite commonplace ideas, that were essentially daft, and advance them to the point where any intelligent reader could see where they lead. But not so far as to collapse into humourless sarcasm; only far enough to give the reader the briefest amusing glimpse through the hell gates, into the suffering beyond. That is where he comes in here. For each of the proposals cited (and the many for which I had no space) is simply a conventional "social democratic" or "progressive" aspiration, taken a little farther than conventional "social democrats" would want to go. But not all that much farther. For some of the proposals were nearly achieved in countries like Greece, before they were overtaken by public bankruptcy. And others have been advanced in more fiscally respectable countries, such as Germany, where a fear of radical Islam, that can't be publicly acknowledged, has contributed to vaguely anti-religious legislation, that then becomes politically incorrect to enforce, except on Christians. One might flag so general a demand as, "Strengthen the separation of church and state." This looks almost innocent, until the reader reflects that the protesters demand state control of everything. It follows that any church (synagogue, mosque, or temple) under this arrangement must go underground. Or one might flag, more specifically: "Make home-schooling illegal. Religious fanatics use it to feed their children propaganda." Now them is genuine fightin' words. Speaking on behalf of religious fanatics, my comment would be: "They killed their babies, and now they want to appropriate ours." Indeed, the idea that opposition to abortion-on-demand makes one ipso facto a religious fanatic is of grave relevance here; together with the increasingly common "progressive" notion that any manifestation of religious belief is evidence of dangerous anti-social tendencies. There is a reason why all the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were atheist, and persecuted the religious - in fact slaughtered millions of Christians, Jews, and persons of other faiths. For religion is the last bastion against the tyranny of worldly power. In the religious we find minds ultimately obedient to God, not Mammon; and the vanity of Mammon will not be assuaged. The threat from these people is hardly immediate. It would be nearer the truth to say that, far from representing "the 99 per cent," the OWS demonstrators represent the one per cent; and those who find them clueless and embarrassing, are the rest of the population. Against the background of current events, as we watch (erstwhile democratic) governments disintegrate which have simply spent themselves into perdition, OWS demands are merely comic. Not one I have seen could in fact be satisfied without accelerating the disintegration - for even those which do not explicitly require huge new expenditures of money, would implicitly require huge sums to enforce. Yet it is useful, as I have tried to be, to set them out on the table. Ignore, for a moment, the Halloween costumage, and tricks, and ask these people to explain in plain language what they want. These "unofficial" demands are the closest we get to a plain answer. And there's the biggest joke. They only want more of what Nanny State tried unsuccessfully to deliver. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top