Occupy Wall Street: Outing the Ringers

http://twitter.com/jsmooth995

A few thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, I've been watching it and going down there for a while now but hadn't had a chance to speak on it.

By the way when I say some news media people are "ringers," I don't necessarily mean that they deliberately obfuscate, or get orders from some shadowy figure to do so. I think they'll often just have a personal investment in the system and status quo that's being critiqued/threatened, so they'll naturally--without any need to conspire--have their perception skewed by an instinct to protect the status quo they're invested in. So though it's quite possibly not their intention to play the ringer, it's the function they wind up serving nonetheless.

"Rainbow in the Dark" instrumental provided by Das Racist:

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Occupy Wallstreet

I started out feeling skeptical about this movement,

and I think there's still work to be done

making sure it's as inclusive as it needs to be

among other things

but I've been watching it, and I've been going down there

and I have to say it is an inspiring scene,

and I think they are getting a lot of things right.

And when it comes to the core of it,

the goals and the messaging,

I think Occupy Wall Street is dead on.

I think it's every bit as specific as it needs to be.

And every bit as non-specific as it needs to be.

It's just specific enough to capture that basic sentiment so many people share,

and it's just vague enough to let many different people come to it

with many different shades of that sentiment.

And as it keeps growing and coalescing,

if certain people keep on professing not to get it,

those were probably the people who weren't supposed to get it.

And that is what I love most about Occupy Wall Street

As a media person who loves to watch how we communicate in that sphere,

I love Occupy Wall Street for how it manipulates all the news media's biggest corn balls

into outing themselves as corn balls.

I love watching them go on and on about how they have no idea what everyone's protesting.

I love watching them pretend it's just a bunch of hippies who don't matter

because they don't dress respectably.

I love how when it gets too big for that,

they start saying it doesn't matter because it's a bunch of yuppies who DO dress respectably.

I love when they say it's off-the-mark because the financial sector is mostly in midtown nowadays.

Like you really can't comprehend that this is about what Wall Street symbolizes.

I love when they say it's off the mark because we should be protesting Washington.

As if the symbolic Wall Street's undue influence on the symbolic Washington

hasn't been a running theme of this protest from the start.

I love this whole spectacle of everyone scrambling and scraping for ways to pretend that something

serious isn't happening here. It's like a big gameshow where everyone competes to see who

can build the biggest strawman. And it's not only fun to watch,

it provides a valuable service, because it reveals to us all who the Ringers are Wall Street's Three-card

Monte table.

Back in the 80s I bought all my vinyl at a place called The Music Factor

in Time Square. So I used to hang out on that block and study how the Three-card Monte games worked.

And as you probably know, every Three-card Monte setup has a Ringer. The Ringer's job is

to pretend they're an objective, outside observer commenting on the game,

when they're actually a part of the hustle who's there to help bamboozle

the public into thinking this game is legitimate. So naturally if we stand next

to the game and start telling everyone that the game is rigged, the Ringer is going

to flip on us and start doing everything they can to make sure nobody

listens to us. They're going to tell everyone that we're a bunch of losers who are just

hatin' because we don't know how to play the game. We're a bunch of

cardgame-hating socialists. They're going to try everything they can

to discredit us so they can protect that game that they're so invested in.

And it feels like that's what we've been seeing all month with Occupy Wall Street.

And you might be thinking to yourself my analogy is incomplete because

those card games also have a lookout, who's there to make sure the cops aren't

coming to shut the game down. And they usually have some muscle,

who's there to intimidate us from messing up the game.

And you'd be right, but that's how this version of the game is different.

In this version of the game, the hustler's don't need lookouts because the cops

don't want to shut down the game. In this version of the game, the cops are the muscle

to intimidate us from shutting down the game.

And that's not to say I think every police officer is a bad-guy, I suspect that many

rank-and-file officers are sympathic to this cause.

But the police, as an instititution, their function in this game has been to

step in and quiet us down whenever we shout, at the top of our lungs,

that we think this whole game is rigged.

So like I said at the beginning, I think there is a lot of work yet to be done,

and a lot of cards still left to fall just the right way for this to become everything that

it could be, but I do think it has incredibly potential. I think it's already

accomplishing big things. And if it doesn't accomplish anything else, I think Occupy

Wall Street has provided a vital service, simply by making it clear who the Ringers are,

and who the muscle is, at Wall Street and Washington's Three-card Monte

table. And I just hope the movement is sharp enough to survive this next stage of the game.

Where they realize they can't shut us down, so they start trying to co-opting us instead,

and make us a part of the game.