You gotta love this Jimmy Kimmel Live spoof (I think it's a spoof!) of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York and around the country:
Guy with megaphone: What do we want?
Crowd: We aren't really sure!
Guy with megaphone: When do we want it?
Crowd: We want it now!
Genuine interviews I've seen with these protesters indicate the same high level of intellectual heft. In fact, Occupy Wall Street is so inane that it has almost the pantheon of the celebrity left (Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, Roseanne Barr, Yoko Ono, etc.) "speaking out" in its behalf.
Yeah–it's funny. But it's big ideas writ large and the ideas are those of the American left. If you want to see how truly confused and ignorant of economic reality the left is, listen to Occupy Wall Street. Abe Greenwald of Commentary captures their "intellectual dyslexia:"
The self-demonizing millionaires and state-worshipping police haters barely scratch the surface of the ideological dyslexia at work. One Occupy Wall Street member's proposed "list of demands" calls first for nativist "trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market," and then for one-worldist "open borders migration," so that "anyone can travel anywhere to work and live."
The document, like the motivation behind it, is a hodgepodge of paranoia, entitlement, self-pity, self-righteousness, class warfare, and economic illiteracy. If this spotty protest moment becomes broad-based and loud the thorough airing of modern-day leftism will prove to be a conservative's election-year dream come true.
David Freddoso, who has penned an open letter to Occupy Wall Street, seems to concur that this protest isn't going to endear the left to Americans who have real jobs, or those who aspire to having real jobs:
What I mean is that if 99 percent of Americans actually sympathized with your cause, the entire nation's economy would have collapsed long ago — apparently to the delight of the organizers of this current protest.
What I mean to say is, you have a marketing problem.
When you decided to sit in traffic and block the Brooklyn Bridge a few days ago, with that blazing pink "SMASH PATRIARCHY-SMASH CAPITALISM" sign in hand, you probably didn't see the regular people you stranded in traffic.
You know, the ones with real-world concerns, business to attend to, families to go home to, et cetera. You may have read about such people during college in a book called "The Petit Bourgeoisie," or something like that. Many of us grew up calling them "the middle class."
Whatever you call them, they are hurting badly in this economy, probably more than you are. (I'm just judging by that sweet digital video camera I see you holding out in front of the cops, in hopes of provoking them into a viral-video police brutality incident.)
Those people you left stuck in traffic have a hard time paying their bills and rents and health insurance and mortgages. They worry about things like finding decent schools for their children to attend and making sure they don't get fired at work, and fixing leaking roofs and chimneys.
You know what they don't worry about, ever? Smashing patriarchy and capitalism.
Occupy, by the way, has been described as the tea party of the left.
I leave it to you to decide which is the more serious.