Powerline's calling him
the craziest occupier of them all, but this fellow who "occupied" some piece of artwork on Broadway had at least some rational demands:
He also told cops he wouldn’t come down until Mayor Bloomberg resigned — and asked for a cigarette and a jacket to get warm.
Incidentally, the fellow is from Toronto. Which reminds me to tout Matt Labash's hilarious write-up of
his time in Zuccotti park.
the first revolutionaries I encounter are two masked-up anarchists named
Spooky and Newport. They wear studded leather jackets which bear
hand-painted inscriptions like “Fight War, Not Wars” and are clad in
black from head to toe. Except Newport additionally sports a chartreuse
fright wig and sunglasses with reflecting marijuana leaves on the
lenses. They seem to know they’re a spectacle, since they stand in front
of a cardboard sign that reads “Pictures for change or a dollar.”
Meaning the passing fanny-packing tourist hordes or smirking financial
sector barbarians can get their snaps taken with Spooky and Newport
So apparently they're not against capitalism after all? These guys, at least, are opportunists.
I point out that they are exploitative capitalists, no better than
the greedy little gunsels at Goldman Sachs whose heads we’d like to
microwave in order to feed their plump flesh to those who are hungry for
change. Either you’re part of the solution, or part of the problem.
You’re either part of “us,” the “99 percent” (as all the surrounding
signage identifies us), or you’re part of “them”—the rapacious 1
percent, who are purportedly strangling our nation by holding roughly
one-third of its wealth, even if they also pay 38 percent of all federal
income taxes while the bottom 47 percent of the population pay nothing
(a Revolution is no place for facts and figures).
Spooky is apologetic. “We’re travelers, we’ve got to capitalize on
the whole thing,” he admits. “A lot of these guys are taking advantage
of the situation.” Including him, I suggest. “Exactly,” he smiles. Or at
least I think he smiles, since he won’t unmask. “I ain’t gonna lie
about it. I’m homeless. I’m gonna take advantage of something like this.
Not gonna pretend like I’m some huge political rocker ‘f— the
government!’ when I know I’m not.” Don’t get Spooky wrong, he does
believe in “f— the government,” he hastens to add, since he is, after
all, an anarchist. “But I’ve already had a few people tell me this is a
homeless man’s dream camp.”
But the Canada link --the reason "Toronto" brought this to mind-- was this little factoid:
Like most trouble in the world, this trouble started with Canadians. Specifically, the Vancouver-based anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters, which launched the initial call for protest in July.
Seems to be a fair amount of NIMBY involved when folks in Vancouver call for the occupation of Wall Street. Why not occupy the Port of Vancouver, to protest all those Chinese goods flooding North American markets and taking our jobs? Or occupy the Vancouver financial district?
