Classic. The Globe and Mail this morning carries an article by Konrad Yakabuski, in which he frets about the “further polarization” that OccupyWallStreet is allegedly causing among the American electorate.
The print edition carries a huge photo* of the most freakish protester a journamalist/editoricist could possibly find in the corporate media tickle trunk. A man with his face covered with tattoos, beaded choker, nose-ring and, incongruously, a Confederate flag jacket with matching pin on a white Stetson.
Big Media pulled this sort of smarmy stunt routinely during the anti-Vietnam-war protests, until literally millions of people from all walks of life took to the streets. It was harder to play that miserable little con-game then.
But play it they will, as long as they can get away with it. This is vintage visual propaganda: those protesting the catastrophic depredations of Wall Street corporate gamblers are not like you and me. They’re marginal figures, possibly insane, and politically confused. No wonder the cops have been wearing out their truncheons on them.
Yakabuski is better than his editorial treatment here, but he’s like a kid lost in a snowstorm. He insists that the protesters are just the Tea Party in reverse: 2012 politics threatens to be “a shouting match between the extremes of U.S. politics.”
It’s “extreme,” he thinks, to react with anger to the enormous hurt done to ordinary Americans by the Wall Street banksters who’ve been running the country into the ground while sucking up humongous corporate bailouts from the servile Obama administration.
Some Democrats, anxiously testing the electoral waters, seem to be recognizing at long last that the solution to Wall Street greed and incompetence is not to reward it with vast dollops of taxpayers’ money.
For their part, Republicans are calling the protesters “anti-American.” But of course.
All this apparent polarization has got Yakabuski worried. “More and more, it looks like the centre will be an orphan in 2012,” he laments.
The perils of binary thinking. We’ll soon see, I think, that the righteous protests against “the 1%” are the centre. Tattoos and piercings aren’t required to observe the devastating effects of corporate piracy and government complicity right across the US. Millions of perfectly ordinary people are living amidst the smoking ruins. And they don’t need a weatherman—or the corporate media—to tell which way the wind blows.
* Can’t find the thing online: it’s a Thomas A. Clary/AFP/Getty image.
