Lots to see here, Fox News surpassing their usual arse-wipingly low standards to show us just how far from the tree the apple now lies. Look out for the real lowlight at the 3′20″ mark, when Steve Moore pours bonus scorn on one of their less articulate vox poppers. “He wants peace…” sneers Moore, before tailing off and disappearing momentarily down the cul-de-sac of his own deeply repressed self-loathing. PEACE EH?! WOW! That guy must be a TOTAL DOUCHE!
It seems like suddenly I’m posting daily, not sure why that is. Today’s post has kind of written itself through the feeds. It started with word that the OccupyTogether movement now lays claim to 66 ‘occupations’ in America and around the wider world, and is set to touch down at the London Stock Exchange on October 15th.
[They disabled the embed, the dicks. Find it here.]
It appears someone somewhere is asking us to take this seriously. Says it’s creator: “In all seriousness, the most compelling elements of Facebook’s Timeline are the ones that made Kodak’s Carousel popular. Reminiscing is a social activity. It always has been, and now Facebook is bringing that activity online.”
This is such an immaculate portrait for the times. His American Psycho chic, the reverent zeal in his eyes as he lets us in on his little secret, framed by the astons of BBC News and the bewilderment of its anchors in the face of something approximating reality.
The ebullient indifference to the human dimension of recession, the assumption that all anyone could, should or would want to do in the face of it is turn profit.
This is the guy #OccupyWallStreet is gunning for, him and thousands like him getting their little dicks hard at night thinking about growing unemployment, failing education, unaffordable healthcare.
Remember his face. When things get worse, remember that guys like him are sleeping all the better for it.
[UPDATE 12:47 27/09/2011]Speculation now rife that ‘Rastani’ is actually an invention of the culture-jamming group the Yes Men. If that proves true, I guess the portrait has its artist.
[UPDATE 16:49 27/09/2011] It has been confirmed that Rastani was NOT one of the Yes Men, by the Yes Men. Leaving the rest of us to reflect on the fact that, when a trader broke cover and told us exactly how it is, our first reaction was to presume it satire.
Mainstream media coverage of the #OccupyWallStreet protest currently taking place in the Big Apple has been conspicuously muted thus far. It took the NYPD getting heavy-handed with some protesters at the weekend to bring it into focus for the New York press, and signs are there that the wider world is starting to wake up to this small but by no means insignificant movement. That being the case, these comments by Noam Chomsky couldn’t come at a better time:
In which the author: deactivates his Facebook account; pits Barrett vs Malick; discovers a forgotten email; reflects on life, and the human faculty of memory; realises that Mitt Romney must be a total ass-hat.
So I’m sat here, on a Friday night in. Ems and the girls are asleep upstairs, I’m sorting through a laptop I’ve brought back from work. It’s three or four years old now, I’m not sure what that is in computer years, but it’s definitely time to install pipe and slippers.
About half an hour ago I deactivated my Facebook account. Not an all-out deletion, but I’ve been building up to opting out for a while and I can’t see myself coming back any time soon.
Haven’t posted much lately. Sure I’ll be back at some point. In the mean time, here’s a picture of Carrie Fisher and her stunt double catching some rays on the set of Return of the Jedi.
1984
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
Emma and I are only now coming to terms with everything that happened on Monday, a sense of which you should be able to get from the videos I posted at the time.
These videos only show the riot police reclaiming our street. Prior to that it was thronging with local people, some of them actively confronting the police and setting fire to vehicles, others just looking on. (That I was able to drive our car – the red one just outside the window – away two hours later without a scratch on it is almost impossible to believe.)
For both of us ‘coming to terms with it’ seems to involve periodically bursting into tears, mainly when we go out and walk the streets of a borough we’ve grown to love in the ten years we’ve lived here, one that was unrecognisable to us on Monday, one that still bears the scars despite of the council’s best efforts.
Then we just thank our lucky stars our little girls are okay. It was the thought of them in the back room of our house that really shook us up, even if the prism of shock and adrenaline refracted this into a kind of warped, exuberant hysteria that carried us through a long, sleepless night.
Thankfully the wrath of the crowd outside didn’t seem to be directed against residents – they were targeting vehicles, police and local shops. Our local newsagent, City News, withstood their attentions all the way through until 1am, at which point we heard a few loud bangs and looked out the windows to see the shutters up and a few local kids inside.
The fifteen minutes that followed were truly heart-breaking. We know the guys who run the shop well, they’re our friends, and they work harder than most people do to scrape a living, putting up with a fair few indignities along the way. They are generous-spirited and supremely tolerant guys. They deserved better than this from the community they serve.
I filmed it all from our front window, but the footage is dark, all you can really make out is a kind of feeding frenzy, as the crowd quickly grows and the shop is stripped of booze and cigarettes. Young, old, black, white, men, women; people happy to steal from others, but who haven’t had the breaks in life to be able to do it quietly.
There’s a lot I have to say about this – my headline view is that the greatest shame would be if it pushes instinctively left-leaning UK residents to the right, and that I doubt nearly as many politicians, police, city plutocrats and members of the press have the right to take the moral high ground here as would like to think so.
If you want to call me out on either of those points friend me up on Facebook and come start an argument. The point of this post is to put the guys at City News on the map, at a time when lots of people seem to be working to help local businesses recover: two sterling examples are Help Siva and Keep Aaron Cutting. The guys at City News say they saw £10k of damage, and are unlikely to see more than £5k back from insurance. All week Emma and I have been feeling a strong urge to try and help them close that gap.
I know there are probably more worthy causes out there – Emma and I have donated more to Unicef to help in the Horn of Africa than we’ve given at any time since the tsunami – but I also believe that charity has a local role, and that this is one of the best ways a community can best express itself.
With that in mind the first thing I do after I post this will be to send the link to a man called Jake who runs Hackney Council for Voluntary Service. They are collecting donations on behalf of one Clarence Road shop-owner, Siva, and I will be asking them what the procedure would be to raise funds to make sure City News do not end up out of pocket.
If we manage to work something out rest assured you’ll be hearing about it – I’ll be letting members of all the different communities of which I am a member – be they geographical (Hackney/London/UK/The World/The Universe) or virtual (Twitter/Facebook/The whole damn Interwebz) to chip in.
Feels like now is a great time for online communities – and people for that matter, regular people, people like you and me – to be showing that we can be a force for good, without waiting for the leviathan of the state to do it for us – if we do that we might find ourselves waiting longer than any of us can afford.
The most wretched part was watching the shop across the road looted, at around 1am. They went through it in about fifteen minutes, took all the booze, all the cigarettes. A gang of them, young men and women, white and black, late teens and early twenties. They’re the ones whose future we’ve mortgaged, and we can’t keep up the payments. How else should we expect them to behave?
