Movement Jokes
by digby
I wonder if it would be possible for Jon Stewart not to concern troll about dirty hippies allegedly defecating on police cars on his show?
“Of course it hasn’t been all good news for the movement. For all their popularity, for all the participants with thoughtful critiques of our power structure, there’s also this: A guy taking a shit [bleeped] on a police car.
“You know what? Guy shitting [bleeped] on a police car? Meet me at camera three.
“NO! NO! BAD! [mimes spraying with water bottle, whacking with rolled up newspaper] NO! NAUGHTY! NAUGHTY!
” ‘Cause here’s the problem. Unfortunately, protests are often as much about optics as they are about substance. And you do not want this [photoshopped photo of Chinese democracy protester shitting on row of tanks] to be your Tiananmen Square. You have tapped into a real injustice that people feel about the global financial markets. Nothing can derail your movement faster than someone who is unable to derail their movements.”
Does Jon Stewart think that this was a planned act by the protesters? Does he believe that this is a common mode of OWS protest? If not, and it was a single, random act of social anarchy by this middle aged man (whom the photographer assumes was a protester) doing an act of extreme civil disobedience, what does he think the occupiers should have done about it?
I get that this is mostly just the typically silly potty joke that kids of all ages seem to love and wouldn’t normally even comment on it. But the reason it is becoming an iconic image is because it falls neatly into a long standing tactic of dehumanizing protesters with charges of uncontrolled animalistic behavior. I’m sure Stewart isn’t trying to do that. But it would be nice if he had a little bit more consciousness of how he is helping to spread that word by implying that the protesters are sanctioning this and have some authority to put a stop to it.
Nobody knows the motives of this man who did this thing. It could have been a radical political act or it could have been the act of someone with loose screws who’s just hanging around the protest area. But to impute that act to Occupy Wall Street is cheap, even if it’s in service of a cheap joke.
Not that it matters, really. This is already an iconic image of the protests among the wing nuts, passed along with the same sick prurient glee that the neighbors had when they passed that little book of civil rights protesters alleged beastly behavior to my parents in the deep south in 1964. I guess that stuff never gets old.
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