The Left’s constant search for the Tom Joad Moment

Through out my life our buddies on the distaff side have been looking for what I would call “The Tom Joad Moment.” Remember near the end of The Grapes of Wrath, as Tom prepares to go underground he reassures Ma that he will be there in the wind, on the side of the people.

Well the #Occupy Whatever movement is right on the job. From the gourmet feed bags to the piles of money they seem to be ready for the revolution. Except when they’re not, ask them what they want and what they’ll do to get it they’ll answer “Hell if I know, what you got.”  Do they want jobs, well only if they get one in their desired personal niche that fills their desire for fulfillment and at fifty grand a year minimum. We finally see the ultimate intellectual collapse of the University bubble, twenty – something’s up to their keisters in debt without the skills to pay it off, and no desire to build those skills. So here we stand in Zucotti Park with winter closing in and the most highly credentialed lumpen proletariat in the history of industrial civilization begging for spare change. The Coffee Party and the No Labels Movement in dreadlocks.

About two weeks ago, M and I where sitting in Washington Sq. soaking up the sun. Basically doing what old folks are supposed to do. Over by the fountain a march was gathering, the usual SEIU purple, UAW blue, and Teamsters gold getting ready to march downtown in support of the #Occupandos. A young woman approached us passing out their two color flier and went into her spiel. As she proved the old proverb, “Better to be silent and be thought a fool, then to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt”, I asked the question I’d always wanted to ask, had you ever made anything and tried to sell it?

She thought for a while and answered yes to both questions. I didn’t push it, never did find out what her major was, but we started to get in to it. Seems she felt the world owed her, that the country was just too unfair, that her parents had worked all their lives and didn’t own a house. How this was supposed to mesh with her calling the collapse of the housing bubble a capitol offense just slipped by her. I should have asked her did she want her parents to be destroyed in the backwash, or was she happy that they had lost as little as they did? I’ll never know, you know how these off the cuff discussions run.

She even tried to pull a race thing on us, telling us that the Founding Fathers were all white business men and should therefore be discredited. At this point I had to tell her what I used to do, and I think it finally shook her a little. Well all the people who ever worked for me could never just start their own workshops, she whined, the system is set against them. How can we make a living just buying and selling. At which point I said but that’s what it’s all about just look around you, my gesture taking in the buildings surrounding the park; that’s the world you live in. But she never got it, the life of making and buying and selling and growing skills was just too complicated for her highly educated mind. Zinn’s “History of the American People” she could understand, but the actual life of the American People escapes her. Her understanding of modern finance is about as subtle as a Tom Otterness sculpture.

So what is this Tom Joad Moment, well that’s the moment when the Revolution comes to fruition, when the people rise up in their righteous anger and overthrow the Over Lords, when the movement becomes a weapon. Except there is one problem with thinking that the #Occupiers, or any of their more mainstream supporters, can use this weapon because it’s aimed at their own foreheads, as it always has been through out modern American history.

Back in the Sixties this weapon was fired three times, once in the cities, once in the rice paddies of South Vietnam, and once on the college campuses, it blew holes in the Left at each trigger pull. The inner city riots destroyed the cities in which they happened, some like Detroit and Newark are shells of what they were. Though the army in Vietnam was stretched it did not break, no matter how hard the organizers tried to create mutiny. As an aside, Jane Fonda is still hated by wide swaths of the American people as a traitor. As for the universities, the Gramcian Long March through the Institutions was a success, I’ll grant them that. The Left’s complete control of the levers of culture is a major metric of such success. But once the draft was dropped the peace movement went up in smoke, and any campus violence soured many on the Movement.

Because this weapon is so dangerous to those that wield it, is the reason that the #Occupandos sound so incoherent, to the point that some freelance Tea Partiers make the  mistake that the two groups are going in the same direction. Not bloody likely. The Tea Party’s desire for a shrinking of the size of the federal government and a return of power over spending to lower levels of government is the complete opposite to the #Occupiers desire to grow government through a destruction of the financial sector, the complete dissolution of debt, and the development of a type of Anarcho-Syndicalist political system built on “democratic” consensus, in other words the rule of the insomniac.

Though the institutional Left will try to bolster the #Occupiers with support in the MSMOakland as the garbage and violence become too great to hide. A similar point is coming in NYC as our illustrious mayor realizes that these people are no friend of his. The real problem happens when the trigger is pulled and the ensuing violence blows up in the Left’s face.

They say the Harold Pinter was the greatest dramatist of the twentieth century, he seems an acquired taste to me. But his two person play Trouble in the Works seems like it was written for this moment. JimG33