The Fortnightly Rant for October 21, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 256, No. 2, posted online Monday, December 12, 2011.
Two weeks ago we reported on the absence of mainstream news coverage of Occupy Wall Street. Things have changed a bit since then.
On Sunday evening, ABC News’ Cecelia Vega reported that “the movement to occupy Wall Street is now occupying street corners in more than 250 cities across the country — and it doesn’t end there. There are now protests on every continent except Antarctica.” 
Then, on Monday, this photo made the rounds:
The Occupation has conquered both time and space — it has lasted for more than a month, and if the photo at right is genuine, it is taking place on every continent including Antarctica.
Afflicting the Comfortable
Like the Occupation itself, signs of its success are everywhere. The most telling ones come from those it threatens.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor [R-VA] acknowledged the existence of the Occupation at a Values Voters summit on October 7th, saying he was “increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country.” Anything that makes Eric Cantor nervous is a sign of progress.
Cantor went on to say that “some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans.” Ever the good Republican, he showed no sign of detecting the irony.
A Right Wing James O’Keefe wannabe named Patrick Howley infiltrated an Occupation march on the National Air and Space Museum being held to protest a display glorifying unmanned drone aircraft, planning to “mock and undermine” it. We know his intent because he was careless enough to write about his “mission” in advance in The American Spectator.
Howley managed to shove his way into the museum and provoke a guard into pepper spraying him, but the incident seems not to have caused any lasting damage.
The Occupation was even mentioned, sympathetically if elliptically, in a speech by President Obama. It’s all well and good for the President to talk nice, but he shouldn’t expect to hear many nice things back — unless he reverses course and jails some of his campaign donors.
Novel Tactic, Novel Question
A few hundred protestors marched to the Upper East Side on October 11th, waggling their signs and chanting disrespectful remarks in front of the homes of tax-evading hedge-fund tycoon John Paulson, plutocrat and propaganda-buyer David Koch, bank CEO and self-serving Fed board member Jamie Dimon, and crooked media baron Rupert Murdoch.
One of Murdoch’s comely female minions later interviewed an Occupier in the Fox News studio. [Her name, sadly, did not appear in the video clip. — The Ed.]
“Why is it lawful,” she wanted to know, “to show up on someone’s doorstep — that’s their private property — to bring a protest to their home … and all of a sudden you scare them — you terrorize them.”
Her guest, Harrison Schultz, showing some real political potential, said, “The real question I believe you should be asking is why is it legal to throw people out of their home.” The minionette would have none of that, though. “No,” she said, “answer that question that I asked you ….”
For a tense minute or so the two contenders grappled for control of the dialogue. The interviewer tried dragging in an unrelated and probably apocryphal story about an alleged friend of a person she had interviewed earlier.
Do you think, she asked Schultz, that it’s OK “to show up at [someone’s] doorstep and commit violence?”
Preemptive Meme-ry
Taking up what could be called the Murdoch Challenge, OpenMediaBoston.org conducted a “Write the Next Stupid F$&king Right Wing Meme About #OccupyBoston!” contest. In keeping with the spirit of our fact-free times, three winners were chosen “after nearly 48 hours of continuous deliberation of the top 7,000,000 submissions by [an] elite panel of 50,000 judges from 12 continents.”
Our favorite among the winners was this one by Sarah Forbes: “The preserved corpse of Vladimir Lenin has been re-animated by climate scientists and is now leading the Occupy movement.”
Now What?
An instant after the Big Bang, the Universe was already a huge success. “Here I am,” it might have said, “from here on out you have to deal with me.”
The Occupation is in a similar position. It may have begun as large groups of people occupying particular places at the same time — but who has the power to restrict it to that form? George Washington and his suffering Army had to endure a winter at Valley Forge, because they were struggling to take territory away from a king. The Occupiers don’t have the same burden, and they need not use the same methods.
This is a fight against a corrupt economic and political system whose tentacles reach everywhere. The participating Occupiers have already taken back those most important pieces of real estate, their own hearts and minds. They can declare victory tomorrow and walk away, carrying the fight with them, changing tactics and recruiting allies as they go.