‘How Are OWS and the Tea Party Different?’; the home game

posted at 11:04 am on October 17, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Media ]   

A popular game making the rounds on the Internet these days seeks to answer the question “How is Occupy Wall Street different from the Tea Party?” (Initially, the question included the phrase “and alike,” but that was eons ago, before OWS grew into the worldwide phenomenon it has become. It now seems abundantly clear that the Occupy movement has no desire to be compared with the Tea Party, which it and liberals see as yesterday’s news.)

Among the game players is Big Journalism’s Jeff Dunetz, who serves up a lengthy list of distinctions, among them defecating on police cars and desecrating the American flag (both in the Occupiers column).

One of the unintentionally funniest comparisons is by psychoanalyst Todd Essig, who writes at Forbes.com that the chief difference between the two movements is exclusion versus inclusion:

From the start the Tea Party was about safety through exclusion, protecting oneself from outside influences—including a President seen as an un-American ‘other,’ perhaps for racial reasons, perhaps other reasons as well. What the Tea Party rejected was anything perceived by them as coming from outside the center of America. It’s not us, it’s never us; it’s them. Bad things were by definition ‘un-American’ or ‘against the Constitution.’

[…]

The start of OWS is radically different. Everyone is included, everyone gets to have a say. Rather than policy they have process. The ‘we’ of OWS is worldwide, a globalized, networked ‘we’ full of good and bad existing simultaneously and everywhere. The messier the better….

One would assume that as a student of mind, Essig is familiar with the figure-ground illusion, shown on this page. The notions of “outsider” versus “insider,” of “we” versus “they,” are similarly illusory and subjective, not bound to absolute judgments of the kind Essig is making.

One particularly interesting distinction that has been drawn is the police response to each of the protest movements. A blogger named Jeremy Bloom riffs on an article by Nate Silvers of the New York Times that addresses the increase in media coverage of the OWS movement as result of clashes with police. Bloom also falls victim to the figure-ground trap by imputing police brutality to these clashes, even though Silver never mentions the word brutality in his article.

As to the role of the police, filmmaker Michael Moore held out the olive branch to the men and women in blue on Friday, inviting them to join, rather than oppose, the new world order. Moore, whose own calls for jailing the rich anticipated the Occupy movement by eight months, is quoted by Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters as having said:

My last word here … is that the police need to join us. In the same way the Egyptian army joined the people in Freedom Square there in Cairo. This is my appeal to the New York Police Department, the police departments all over the country. You are working class people. You’re not paid enough. You have the most dangerous job in the country, and these rich bastards on Wall Street they have ruined your 401(k)s, your pension funds, your future, your children’s future. Money that should be going to having better law enforcement has gone to needless wars in other lands.

So, my appeal to the police is you are us and we are you, and join us. It’s fun. We’ll even let you beat on a bongo drum.

Related Articles

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• Occupy L.A.: We will need violence and socialism to achieve our goals
• The left and Big Labor get their ‘Tea Party’
• Michael Moore’s solution to the nation’s financial ills: Jail the rich (VIDEO)
• Michael Moore slams killing of Osama bin Laden as un-American
• Michael Moore advises Obama and Democrats: Get angrier
• Stop blaming Bush … says Michael Moore?

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