I laugh at people, some of whom make a profession of cooking up movements in GOP think-tanks funded by oil billionaires and dressing them up to look like popular uprisings, and how they're desperately trying to characterize the Occupy Wall Street movement as rag-tag, losers jealous of other people's success and living out some 60's fantasy be-in. I don't know what the Occupy movement will be, and whether in a year we'll see its emerging direction as the work of genius or scoundrel. But I do know we're watching something we haven't seen before. And to the frustration of its targets, it's not going away. Nearly a month now for New York, and as you know now in Trenton and Jersey City.
DCCC just made a pretty cynical attempt to list-build off the Occupy Wall Street movement, with a broad campaign directing Democrats to sign in with their email addresses, and deliberately ignoring the fact that OWS organizers hold the Democratic Party responsible for Wall Streets plunders, too, and not just the Republicans. GOP forces just want to wedge Dems apart and try to make protesters look ridiculous.
But they're not ridiculous. Blessedly, they are not merely partisans of one political party trying to clobber another. And they are self-defining. Not even its allies, like AFL-CIO both nationally and in Jersey, are likely to define it. Nor should they.
One strong signal of OWS singularity is its organizational response to the stumbling block of rally communication. In New York and as #occupy spreads, participants often don't have microphones. In fact, sometimes the presence of an electronic sound system requires permits to use that public space. But reclaiming public space is part , and that's not something they always want to ask permission to do.
A solution: the human microphone. Somebody yells out "Mic check!" and the speaker is heard, in waves from the front to the back of the crowd. It's fragementary, and it can be a little chaotic (see the Michael Moore 'mic check' video after the jump). But it requires discipline its detractors say the movement lacks. And the community cooperation is extraordinary. Moving, even.
Watch this video shot Saturday by Matt Sledge and featuring an Egyptian activist drawing comparisons between this intentionally leaderless undertaking, and the revolution that inspired it, Arab Spring.
Here's a mic check working its way through a bigger crowd in Occupy Wall Street's earlier days, with a little more chaos and trouble repeating with exactitude. But with an emotional Michael Moore, learning for the first time what a mic check is, then calling for a perp walk of the thieves and gangsters of Wall Street:
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