Seriously now.
Last week seemed a sort of watershed moment in the coverage of the Occupy movement: comedians sympathetic to the cause lost any inhibition in mining the movement for material. Even as things in Oakland took a tragic turn, comedians like Stephen Colbert couldn't resist engaging in a little friendly fire closer to home.
It's a sign of acceptance by the wider society, I suppose. At first the media stonewalled them. Then when we started paying attention, we didn't really know whether to take them too seriously. Better not until we do, right?
Gotta say, this protesty new vibe across the land sure makes me nostalgic for my days on Revolutionary Road! What a way to squander a youth! That's the great thing people are always taking for granted about capitalism — it gives every generation a cause for protest! And plenty of products to protest in style. (See Occupy Fashion for current trends!)
My early activist phase was an exercise in mini-Che sartorial flair. Long hair and scruff, thrift shop fatigues and berets. But I never quite fit in with the scateboard-socialists who can't seem to pass up a protest, their tattered copies of Das Kapital and tiresome revolutionary rhetoric at the ready.
Those guys are always so-o-o serious.
And so-o-o-o silly.
Admit it: you feel a little guilty for finding a leaderless movement that uses silly hand signals to build a seemingly ineffectual consensus a bit... well, boring, don't you? We love them and respect them for standing up for what's right, but we wish they weren't so goofy. We wish we could either take them more seriously, or they were way, way hotter.
Yes, I have seen the Hunks of Occupy Wall Street, and there are a few — too few — so far not even enough for a 12-month calendar. You know, maybe Che set the bar for revolutionary beefcake too high. Instead of objects of desire these days we have to settle for objects of gentle derision.
Let me just say: self-awareness is sexy, and self-deprecating humor is, according to recent research, "the key to seduction". Couldn't the revolution benefit from this somehow?
Alas, it may be that the cultures of all revolutionary movements, in breaking decisively with the status quo, struggle most with their sense of humor. This is, in fact, how you know you're dealing with a revolutionary movement: when the only funny anymore is peculiar funny.
This is partly due to the nature of revolutionary thinking. Revolutionaries are — they have to be — True Believers. True Believers come in all stripes, of course — and they have more in common with each other — whether ideologues or religious fanatics, on the right or left — than they do with skeptics who may share some of their views.
Everybody knows: skeptics have more fun.
Unfortunately, healthy skepticism, and the arch humor of the skeptic, are no match for a truly malignant regime. In theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's words, "All the victims of tyranny avail themselves of the weapon of wit to preserve their sense of personal self respect." But laughter's efficacy, he says, "is limited to preserving the self-respect of the slave against the master. It does not extend to the destruction of slavery."
And thus history, with its inevitable drift toward Master-Slave territory, ends up on a crash course with the Island of Humorless Revolutionaries, which usually looks like some combination of the Land of Misfit Toys and the iceberg that took out the Titanic.
Look, the fact is: revolution is no fun. Which is why it would be easier on everyone to just tinker with the tax code. If we truly believe that the income disparity and social injustice we are unwilling victims — and beneficiaries — of is serious enough to reorganize society as we know it (and it probably is), it's no laughing matter.
What Niebuhr wrote in "Humour and Faith" is apropos:
Laughter has sometimes contributed to the loss of prestige of dying oligarchies and social systems... But laughter alone never destroys a great seat of power and authority in history.Not laughter alone. Certainly a little laughter now and again is helpful. Our problem today is that we simply don't know who or what to laugh at. Everything seems sufficiently absurd. The truth is, one of our epic struggles in America today is against absurdity. Our own, mainly. And while there is humor in pointing out the absurd in the struggle against it, ultimately the inability to take ourselves seriously is, well, pretty serious in itself.
The Occupy Movement, while erupting with righteous indignation like a force of nature, is, in so many of its particulars, pretty patently ridiculous. I stress: even for those who take the protests seriously, it's hard to take the protesters themselves — due admittedly to associations we have with their manner of dress or speech — very seriously. And that's partly because they, like us, have grown up absurd.
And the truth is we want it to stay that way. And we want it to stay that way partly because we like being absurd. It's what we know. It's who we are. And besides, the alternative is too bloody awful to contemplate.
We know the problems are serious. They are absurdly serious.
The question is, is the Occupy Movement?
Well, frankly, despite widespread casual support for the broad — not aims exactly — attitude, let's say, Occupy's clever and cutesie modes of consensus have nothing — not a scrap, not one iota — of the moral power and gravitas of a simple gesture of linking arms in Selma, Alabama in 1965, where there was no finger-wiggling, no Guy Fawkes masks, and no silly pseudonyms.
Reinhold Niebuhr, not incidentally, was a sustained inspiration to the last great, and possibly greatest, American revolutionary, Martin Luther King, Junior, whose leadership gave the Civil Rights movement its undeniable moral center.
Selma was not a spectacle, it was a revolution.
Maybe it's unfair to judge Occupy by the same standard. Certainly Occupiers are "being the change they wish to see" (the leaderlessness of the movement is probably a reaction to the dashed messianic hopes for Obama among a certain segment of his base). But can they convince the rest of us they're serious without a clear and cogent voice? Because I have a feeling — and it's just a feeling — that finger-wiggles ain't gonna cut it.
Whatever the case, it's hard to imagine an MLK today, at Occupy, or anywhere for that matter. It's just possible we can do without him, but in any case we'll have to.
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