Michael Lewis has a droll and sad column at Bloomberg that you might want to take a look at. The column is written in the form of a memo from the Strategy Committee of the 1% to the membership. It contains a number of pointed and, I think, correct observations. However, in the context of my occasional observations here about visualcy this section in particular caught my eye:
The second threat is in the unstable mental pictures used by Lower 99ers to understand their economic lives. (We have found that they think in pictures.)
For many years the less viable among us have soothed themselves with metaphors of growth and abundance: rising tides, expanding pies, trickling down. A dollar in our pocket they viewed hopefully, as, perhaps, a few pennies in theirs. They appear to have switched this out of their minds for a new picture, of a life raft with shrinking provisions. A dollar in our pockets they now view as a dollar from theirs. Fearing for their lives, the Lower 99 will surely become ever more desperate and troublesome. Complaints from our membership about their personal behavior are already running at post-French Revolutionary highs.
That, in turn, led me to reflect on some questions. Let’s assume, for a moment, that the long term trend I’ve suggested towards visual communication is, in fact, taking place. I think that to some extent that explains what some (including me) have found so frustrating in the OWS demonstrations, e.g. the lack of a clear agenda. Using the visual communication alone
What do you think the OWS demonstrators intend to communicate and to whom do they attend to communicate it?
What do you think the OWS demonstrators are actually communicating and to whom?
I’m baffled by people who claim not to understand Occupy’s goals. It’s less Occupy’s limitation than the limited imaginations of people who assume that Occupy has to work within the system. But if Occupy believe the system to be the property of the 1%, rigged against them, why would they confine themselves to working within it? What should they be doing? Drafting legislation for a Congress that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Business?
Their goal is to change the dialog and change the thinking of the American people, not to pass a bill that will immediately be ground up in a corrupt institution and end up having no effect.
They need to change a lot of people’s minds and habits of thought — and they are succeeding. They’ve put income inequality squarely at the forefront of people’s minds — especially the young. In a few months they’ve accomplished this, and all while establishment types alternately stand around looking baffled, or panic, like Frank Luntz.
Along the way they’ve put the militarization of police forces, and student loans on the agenda. They have certainly woken me up to the repressive nature of the police in this drug war/terror war world. They’ve radicalized me, and I doubt I’m alone.
What they have done is designate a villain for the story of the last decade. They’ve highlighted a profound problem. They did it with Tweets and Facebook status updates and drum circles and silly speeches and signs and no money or organization behind them. But they did it, nonetheless.
Complaints from our membership about their personal behavior are already running at post-French Revolutionary highs.
Complaints FROM their membership, or complaints ABOUT their membership? I remember in the very earliest days of the Occupy Wall Street protest, the protesters got shunted down some side street. They got stuck under the balcony of some expensive restaurant. The people on the balcony were calling down to and mocking the protesters. Nothing like an image of the elite figuratively pissing on the masses from a literal height to fuel the fires.
They’ve radicalized me, and I doubt I’m alone.
From the guy that compared Bush to Mussolini in 2006 and claimed he and the Republicans were going to overthrow the government and institute marshal law to throw people like you in Gitmo? Funny!
Ice:
It makes me weary that you continue to misquote and mischaracterize me like that. It’s tiresome. It’s like listening to some politician work a focus-tested talking point.
Michael, you know damned well I’m not misquoting you. You took that whole blog down shortly thereafter (apparently worried that calling half your potential audience a bunch of Fascists was a bad move commercially), changed your online name and persona, and even wiped the offending post from the way-back machines. You love to present yourself as some kind of moderate, and I know damned well that you are out in Maxine Waters land of hatred for anyone that isn’t a rabid Democrat. (It still shows through when you claim that the only reason anyone opposes anything Obama does is because they’re secret Klansmen.) If I’d had any idea that you would fight it so, I would have kept a screen cap of the offending post. But you know and I know that what I’m saying is true.
Ice:
Yes, I went to all that effort (actually, don’t have any idea how to do some of that,) so that you wouldn’t be able to quote me.
Ice, I’ve written something like 5,000,000 words in published books. Let’s ballpark another half million words in blogs, comments, etc… Do you really imagine I go around in a permanent cringe lest someone quote a blog post back to me? If you wanted to make me squirm you’d find one of the Harlequin romances I wrote early in my career.
What I believe is so exposed, to so many, in so many ways, and in so many venues, that figuring out what I believe about any number of things is pitifully easy. I’ve explained the Mussolini reference to you before. You don’t care. You care about being angry. So be angry.
But just to make it easy for you as you stalk me looking for incriminating quotes: in addition to michael reynolds, I’ve also used “mtakhalus,” KA Applegate, Pat Pollari, C. Archer, AR Plumb, Katherine Kendall, and of course, Michael Grant. (Others, too, I just forget.) I wrote a blog at a site whose name I can’t recall right now, also at Mighty Middle (the one I took down because of you,) and occasionally at Donklephant, and at Another Lucky Bastard Living in Tuscany. I write comments at Outside the Beltway and here and various other places more rarely.
Jump on in. There’s plenty of material.
The shame of it. That means I’m acquainted with two published romance novelists. Virginia Kantra and her husband are very old friends. He was best man at our wedding; we’re godparents to one of their children. In an interesting twist (considering Michael’s success) her first love in writing was juvenile fantasy (she lived next door to Lloyd Alexander as a kid).
I recognize that food is food but it’s getting so it’s hard to show my face. 😉
Returning to your questions:
I have pretty mixed feelings about OWS, but knowing several people who’ve been active in the protests, I think they deserve partial credit for the recent outflow of customers from Bank of America into credit unions. While that was likely to happen anyway for a number of reasons, I’ve seen it driven online by OWS protestors.
Dave:
She was a marine biologist studying whales. He was a burly treasure hunter whose work might endanger the whales around Cape Cod.
I wish I was kidding.
My wife is afraid to read any of Virginia’s works for fear of encountering herself (or me) in its pages.
Michael, in the past you have “explained” the Mussolini post by denying it ever existed. You deleted that whole blog. I doubt it had anything to do with me, and everything to do with the fact that you accused half the American electorate (and thus your potential customers) of being Fascists.
Yes, you’ve made many other embarrassing comments, but few as easily found (pre-deletion) as one on a blog under your own name. And none of the other comments, egregious as some of them are, are nearly as risible.
Mostly I object to the idea that you are just now getting “radicalized”. You are loonier than Maxine Waters (no small feat that), and have been since I unfortunately came across your comments in the past.
Ice:
I’ve denied your interpretation of the Mussolini thing. I don’t actually remember it in any detail. I know what I would have meant. (In fact, in my memory it was at Donklephant, not at Mighty Middle.) And so do you, I suspect, which is why this is asinine. Shall I throw every stupidly intemperate thing you’ve written in your face every time you comment?
I deleted Mighty Middle because at the time I was just getting back into kid’s books after a hiatus and I had seen that kids Googling “Animorphs” ended up on MM and were quoting me as dropping the f-bomb. That was the single biggest reason I tried to separate my political self from my author self. You forget the milieu in which I work. I didn’t want to seem to be hijacking 10 year-olds to an R-rated (for language) site. I didn’t want to be hearing from their parents and thus from my publishers. The second biggest reason I quit writing the blog was that I had by then discovered a sad truth about blogging: it’s hard work for no pay.
I did not delete it from the wayback machines for the excellent reason that it’s impossible. As I understand it, those archives time out. Frankly, I’m sorry: I have on occasion looked for some of that stuff and I can’t find it.
If you think calling out racists — and again you mischaracterize me, and you do it deliberately — is more of a problem in kidlit than using R-rated language you don’t know much. I can write 500 pages denouncing racists and get no blowback. I can write a million words denouncing racists and get no blowback. One f-bomb and believe me, I hear about it.
In point of fact on my Facebook page — which is my most direct contact with fans — I have repeatedly voiced support for Occupy, and I’ve denounced racism and homophobia. I list myself there as a Democrat. I just don’t say “f-ck.”
Now, you can believe me or not. You’re evidently obsessed. You’ve admitted it. I should think you’d find that a bit humiliating. But in any event absolutely no one who pays the slightest attention to anything I write — and again: 5 million words — believes I’m some wild-eyed radical. In point of fact, Ice, you are. I’m a well-off old dude living in a yachting town. You’re the angry unemployed guy talking about burning the world down because it keeps dumping on you. I’m Maxine Waters? Hah: look in the mirror.
Michael –
Icepick is clearly a rather emotional and currently tortured soul. I’ve tried to encourage him in a positive direction, but to no avail.
However, the observation that you routinely invoke racism, nihilism and just all-round prickishness to those who don’t agree with your worldview is legendary around here, and OTB. If you don’t like the moniker, perhaps you should eliminate the evil descriptives you routinely apply to those who simply have legitimate policy differences with you.
Drew:
It’s ‘legendary’ for both you and Icepick. That’s two. And the notion that either of you is in a position to call anyone else a dick is just funny. In fact at OTB it seems I consistently get up-voted while you go more the other way. Must be my notorious meanness.
But I’ll freely acknowledge that I can be tough — particularly on racists. You on the other hand have yet to acknowledge that racism even exists — or has ever existed. Maybe if you stopped denying clear reality — not to mention a few centuries of history — you’d be less upset at having reality pointed out to you.
Just the other day OTB had a story on a church in Kentucky that voted to refuse membership to any interracial couple. Now, just to check your intellectual honesty: was that racism? Yes or no? Or is that too dickish of me?
And will you answer, or will you pull your usual disappearing act on being asked a direct question or shown some evidence of your error?
Well, Michael, its not, shall we say, the most productive use of time to respond to ludicrous inane assertions like this: “You on the other hand have yet to acknowledge that racism even exists — or has ever existed.”
And if in your world you think this validates you – “In fact at OTB it seems I consistently get up-voted while you go more the other way” – Yes, along with the ponces of the world; then, my sympathies to you.
Drew:
And yet again you refuse to answer a simple question.
When you can’t answer that with a simple yes or no, Drew, you lose any credibility on this subject.
“When you can’t answer that with a simple yes or no, Drew, you lose any credibility on this subject.”
No, Michael, when you keep pounding your fist on the table with such an obvious point and with childish zeal, it is you who lose all credibility. You truly are publicly embarrassing yourself on this. What’s going on in your life that has you so amped up?
Oh, and if it will help you sleep at night……….yes, of course.
Feel better, having acertained the patently obvious? What the hell is wrong with you these days?