Motus Mentis

The weather being particularly fine here in New York this week, with Gotham’s hibernal sleet and snow still well over the horizon, the occupation of Wall Street is humming along nicely, and has the attention of everyone in the chattering classes. (Including, obviously, my own.)

As longtime readers will know, the lovely Nina and I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where the babies still wear red diapers, and where Hugo Chavez, were he ever to seek local office, would be regarded as worrisomely centrist. Naturally, sympathies for the crowd in Zucotti Park run strong in these parts, as I found in a conversation with an old friend just yesterday.

I generally avoid discussing politics around here, preferring to concentrate on more productive topics like the weather, but somehow the Wall Street scene came up anyway. I don’t know what gave away my sentiments — perhaps a momentary tightening of the masseter — but my interlocutor quickly pointed out that the OWS crowd was nothing like those Tea Party folks, who after all were all just a bunch of — and this is a direct quote — “hate-filled racists”. I suggested that they were neither, and pointed out also that the leading Tea Party candidate at the moment is Herman Cain, a black man, but I don’t think I got through, quite.

Just for a little perspective, then, on racial and ethnic neutrality, here’s one of the OWS participants articulating what, from what I’ve seen so far, appears to be rather a widely held view around Zucotti Park:

Antecedent causes aside, it’s hard to see just what sort of final solution this fellow is hoping for. Failing some way of rendering the United States entirely Judenfrei, perhaps OWS can at least petition the UN for statehood.

Meanwhile: white people — and especially you white bucks — are being made to learn your place and keep to it, according to the procedural rules of OWS’s revolutionary council. In this item we read:

Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly operates under a revolutionary “progressive stack.’ A normal “stack’ means those who wish to speak get in line. A progressive stack encourages women and traditionally marginalized groups speak before men, especially white men. This is something that has been in place since the beginning, it is necessary, and it is important.

Ah, democracy in action. (Zimbabwe style.) The wisdom of this, of course, is obvious: when robbing Peter to pay Paul, it’s hard to see much point in asking Peter what he thinks about it all. (There may well come a point, though, when a sufficiently irritated Peter begins to push back, or at least decides his interests would be better served by putting as much distance between himself and Paul as possible.)

My friend being a thoroughgoingly bien-pensant Sloper, he made sure also to refer to the Tea Party as “extremist” — another important contradistinction as regards the sweet reason of the OWS squatters. Over at NRO, columnist Jonah Goldberg examines this view, beginning by noting that the stated goal of the leader of the movement is “to overthrow the government”. You can read Mr. Goldberg’s item here.

Also at NRO: a closer look at just who really makes up “the 99%”.

In a piece about Eric Hoffer a while back, I quoted this remark:

The change that matters is the change of a society’s axioms. The 1960s saw a slaughter of axioms. It would be interesting to identify the new axioms. I can think of a couple: (1) The object of life is fun. (2) The world owes everyone a living.

Exempli gratia, here.

Finally, a persuasive piece over at Verum Serum argues that we really ought to be taking this uprising seriously. One thing in particular struck me, especially in light of a fascinating article I had just read on Tuesday in the science section of the Times. The article was about those curious amoeba-like critters known as “slime molds”.

What’s amazing about slime molds is that they blur, even more than the hymenoptera do, the distinction between individual and group. While ant and bee colonies work together as a team with astonishing group intelligence, the microscopic slime molds go one further. When times are good, they live separate lives, but when things go bad, they band together to form, not a team, but a single, mobile organism. It’s really something. (I first heard about all this when I was a young’un, and I’ve always wondered why they aren’t more famous.)

In Tuesday’s slime-mold article, we read:

Today, biologists no longer think of Dictyostelium as an embryo: It is more like a society of amoebas that come together for a common cause, for which some will sacrifice themselves.

The organisms respond to starvation by rushing together by the thousands into a single blob. The blob stretches out into a slug-shaped mass about one millimeter long (one twenty-fifth of an inch), which then crawls like a worm toward light.

The Verum Serum item made the following point:

Conservatives are individualists by nature so we deal with fear a bit differently. We buy guns. We buy gold. There are even some people out there stockpiling food just in case things get ugly. I’m not at that point myself but the point is, people on the right have plenty of fears about the future. We deal, mostly, by planning to handle it ourselves if necessary.

…

What do collectivists do when they’re scared? They gather. They gather together and express themselves with endless rallies and speeches and sit-ins and giant paper mache puppets (the appeal of which I’ve never understood) and of course occupations. That’s what they’re doing now.

Make of this what you will.