Liberated from the Fall

You wouldn't know it from what Sarah and the TP's (sort of Martha and the Vandellas Through the Looking Glass) dubbed the 'lamestream media', conventional and traditional news outlets, but as someone who knows his way around all the sides of a police barricade, it seems to me the Days of Rage are returning to the Street(s) Where You Live.

When it started, weeks ago, Occupy Wall Street, was a curiosity, a 'let's cross over to the other side of the street now and avoid having to do deal with these people' kind of situation. Now it's starting to look more like a franchise operation with start-ups from Coast to Coast, including Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston with more promised/threatened. Nice work, NYPD, Mayor of New York et al in not buying the Brooklyn Bridge. The chant brought back memories of Clean for Gene and 1968; the outcome even more so. It's the aftermath I dread.

Here's the pissing in the wind part masquerading as analysis from someone who likes to think of himself as middle-aged but when I was my children's age I would have looked at me now and said 'nope, old guy.' And I'd have been right, because I am. I was part of the Pig in a Python Baby Boom Generation, smack in the middle of all of it, class of '52, though it's been decades since I exhibited any class at all. But here's a bulletin from the Back In My Day Geezer, we've been here before and the ride will get dark, much darker, much faster.

The new mother nature taking over, as witnessed elsewhere in the world this past year (Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria to name four locations), fueled and fed by 'social media' who passed the word faster than Revere and Dawes on meth, has come to the Land of Opportunities (for some). The rhetoric is in places a bit hackneyed and trite, sorry my brothers and sisters, word. Make no mistake, large and growing larger by the hour, groups of people from every strata of American society are f'ing cranked. That we're invoking Ike's Ghost suggests if you dismiss this as a lark, you do so at your own peril.

We've always been a country of divides, not just Continental (or Cadillac, in the interest of equal automobiles) but geographic, religious, gender, and let's not forget race and age, but we've come to the big one, the one that the Bank of America, whose ass Buffett, not Jimmy the other one, saved a few weeks back and money changers like the biggest quartet since The Beatles, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith were hoping would remain unnoticed. Rich and not so much.

It might have remained unremarked upon, if the same folks with all the money (already) hadn't screwed themselves, and then the rest of us, when the financial house of cards they'd built collapsed, one pillar of sand after another. Donne's Bell tolled for one and all, even those who have more balls than bells and if this isn't an emergent occasion, I don't know what would be. We have an atmosphere of anger so palpable you can cut it with a knife, but you'll want to use a spoon to get every drop.

The Founders of our American Democracy watched with equal parts fascination and horror as The French Revolution, modeled on our own, descended into a Reign of Terror, creating misery and mistrust from which Europe spent a half century digging out. Is there a 100% chance that the same fate awaits all of us? Who can say? But in terms of mathematical inevitability, we are the 99%. But the men who spurred us on, sit in judgment of all wrong. They decide and the shotgun sings the song.

-bill kenny