Occupy Wall Street Ain't Hog Heaven

The New York Daily News has a lengthy article on the growing divide between the east and west but not in the global terms in which we are used to thinking .

Walking from east to west through the plaza, the stratification is stark, especially at night, when the gawkers and press have mostly cleared out. Inside the park, just past the General Assembly steps, are the library, the press and information tables, the legal table, sanitation and so on. Most of the working groups have been clustered at the east end of the park in order to share one of the few generators they had installed (the FDNY removed those generators Friday, ostensibly because they posed a fire hazard), and the space behind the tables has been the closest thing to a formal area, with only active participants behind them.

Most of the non-participants in turn pitched camp west of there, as far as possible from the workers. That dynamic reinforced itself, as occupiers nervous about their possessions and safety slept by their equipment and each other to the east, while the carnival crowd kept to the other side of Zuccotti.

Let's face it. This is a revolt of the under achievers. They may have much to offer the world in conservation of energy, lofty moralizing and economic illiteracy but driving a cab is more challenging than anything most of these people have done. “What we’re trying to build here,” said Jeff Smith, a member of the Occupy Wall Street press working group, “is a model for the bigger society we’d like to see.” The trouble is the present model is over populated with misfits, the mentally challenged, and unemployables. The core group has grown from a few disaffected malcontents into an army of the clueless. The membership drive didn't balance its egalitarian ideals with the practical dictates of any organization and the result has been a division between intellectual haves and have nots in a wacky winter wonder land somewhere between Walden Pond and Paradise Lost. With no Milton to justify God's ways to man, the settlement has divided itself into two factions. Camped in Zuccotti Park the leadership elite resides and to the west the newly attracted proletarian, the very literally unwashed masses. The police have probably helped the group to recruit crazies. They apparently passed the word to the homeless that the OWS eat well. The article cites one incident where the police refused to remove or silence a deranged singer and told the complainants that he, like they, is entitled to express himself. From Get Off the Street, an organization not enthralled with hippies is the OWS menu prepared off site;

Salmon cakes with dill sauce
Quinoa salad
Organic chicken
Spaghetti bolognese
Tomato salad with fennel and red onion
Roasted beet and sheep’s milk-cheese salad
Wild heirloom potatoes

Wild heirloom potatoes? To hell you say. My palate was never so spoiled. If it were not for the absence of Kobe beef one might think this was the White House menu. One must assume equality stops at the palate because the leadership put an end to the sharing of the gourmet faire with the street people and instead served them red beans and rice. Four legs good two legs better.

This is not to say that the movement is entirely ineffective. In the video, which I gleaned from their web site, the demonstrators take over a public meeting until the bureaucrats and political hacks despair and give up. It is both sickening and frightening to see legitimate civil authority fail to use its authority and surrender to mob rule.