More, more, more street theater! Menacing figures strangling ordinary people with the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Groups of people, stained with something that looks like blood, sitting in the middle of Park Avenue with their hands raised to the sky like beggars, crying “Insure us! Insure us!” Pregnant women marching on the banks with placards reading “Let Our Children Go… To College.” They want to reduce you to unflattering stories; instead, you overwhelm them with unforgettable pantomimes. That way you keep your message concrete and universal, and make conveying it an original experience all at once.

Daily memos to the nation, simply, rationally, eloquently describing the conditions you abhor, and outlining the solutions you advocate. This will nicely counterbalance the spectacle of street theater.

God bless the comedians, but don’t let them near you. They will reduce everything to their own shtick. Let’s face it. They and the bankers share the same accountants.

Forget history. Everyone is talking about protest movements of yore; especially, inevitably, the counterculture of the Sixties. The main difference between then and now is that we live in an unbelievably self-conscious time, when everything seems to be an echo of something else. Everything seems to have quotation marks around it, and countless people now make their living by annotating reality. They will kill you with their pedantry. So ignore them. You are not the “left.” You are not “anarchists.” You are not “hippies” or “hipsters.” You are you. What people are really afraid of is something that has its own vocabulary and idiom because it strikes them dumb. The “experts” then cannot talk past you. Keep your true shape and form to yourself. Don’t let them pin their tired, self-serving definitions on you. Make your own history.