700 Arrested

A charming, quiet week in Malibu with friends.  The weather has been spectacular since I arrived home from NYC.

Art Platform events all weekend.  Abbott Kinney on Saturday afternoon.  Sunday lunch with Fielder and Danny.  Grom ice cream at the Lumber Yard.

On our way downtown we saw the remnants of the LA Wall Street demonstration.

I bought a small work at the new LA Art Fair by a new artist called Ariel Evestingcol called Labor Plot.  A police officer is beating a man with a baton.  I bought it mostly to celebrate the Wall Street Demonstrations.  Which, I failed to mention in an earlier blog I had seen whilst I was in NYC.

Apparently my more elegant gay friends are not interested in supporting our brave comrades down town.  Perhaps if Taylor Lautner was manning the barricades with his shirt off they would join in?

My friend Zelko tells me that there are lesbians on the front line but no gay men.  One young gay man approached Zelko and asked him what he was doing there.  When Zelko told him that he was supporting the cause the 24-year-old countered that he finds the protesters ‘annoying’ for being loud, naked and stinky.  Zelko told him that those were the exact words that came to mind whenever he thought of a gay pride parade.   He asked him if he’d feel differently if the cause was gay rights.  No answer.

As I have been suggesting for some time, the laissez faire…let them eat cake attitude of both the government and the banks will breed dissatisfaction and insurrection.

Let the breaking of windows begin.

What is just (at the moment) an inarticulate expression of the frustrated, hopeless and disenfranchised will surely shape up into something more potent.  The more the police arrest, the unprovoked pepper spraying of innocent young women, the more like Syria it becomes.

I suspect that the government will tread very carefully around further arresting potential martyrs.

I salute the 700!  Being arrested in the USA has severe consequences.

The problem with this demonstration is the lack of articulated protest.  Nobody really knows how to change the system.  Nobody really knows what changes need to be made.  Nobody seems to use language familiar to European socialists.

Socialism may very well be terrifying to the very people who need to use this language the most.

A fair and equitable world.  The people no longer enslaved with crippling debt.  The rich paying a fair tax.  Human rights such as health care and a good education.  Illegal wars must stop.

These are not outrageous demands.

Those protesting in New York have been circulating a list of grievances, most of which are aimed at corporations that they say are too powerful and often unethical. Among the complaints: bank executives received “exorbitant” bonuses not long after receiving taxpayer bailouts and companies have “poisoned the food supply through negligence” and “continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate better pay and safer working conditions.”

The demonstrators seem frightened at the prospect of issuing demands, formulating their own utopian dream and, as I have already said, using the language and heroes of socialist Europe.

Until these young people begin to make emphatic demands these sort of sophomoric sit-ins will not gain any traction.

The ‘haves and the have more’ will look down their noses at these youngsters.  They will exact their revenge unless these fledgling heroes whip up support all over the country, from Albuquerque to Alaska…harness the raw power of the unemployed and demand that their concerns are as relevant as those of the corporations and the banks.

We will see in good time just how effective these youngsters can be at making change, the very same change the wimp Obama promised us all when he spoke to the people…before he won the election.

How cynical his false promises were.

Last night I dreamt of you know who.  As vivid a dream I could not have imagined.

On a windswept street in Europe we talked about reconciliation.  He was wearing the protective armor of an american football player.

He said, “People can’t imagine what I saw in you.”  And I reply, “Well, you knew what you were getting yourself into.  Everything was out there.  Every defect revealed, written about…mocked.”

I have no idea what he saw in me.  I can only imagine that Anthony Patch from Fitzgerald’s Beautiful and the Damned, his great hero…may provide some answers.

In the dream he kissed a man in front of me and I remember thinking that I wanted him to be happy and free.  I remember thinking to myself…why am I fighting this stranger?   What if he triumphs?  Does it really matter?

He really is a better man than I could ever be.  A better liar, better at sex, better intellect, better looking.

I said to him in the dream, “I am sorry that I wasn’t what you thought I could be.  I wasn’t the rich, handsome, debonaire, literary hero you wanted so badly to rescue you from your dull wife.”

“I am so sorry I was too old and poor and fractured.  I am sorry that there was no huge house, no silk slippers, no deliverance from a mundane ‘virtual’ office job.  That is his role…not mine.  He will come and find you, he will take you home to his mansion, he will let you swim in his pool…he will love you like I could not love you.”

The reconciliation I dream about is as hopeless as the dream some of us have of a better USA.