The Grumbling Down Below

By David Simmons

"More and more I see people losing faith in once untouchable and untarnished institutions," the editor of a Vancouver-based news website said on Facebook recently. He was commenting about the "double standards" on how police deal with criminal activities by one of their own, adding: "This force is not the same one I knew years ago and standards have declined – both in terms of investigational skills and in terms of ethics."

Vancouver is not alone in this loss of faith, of course – far from it. And disrespect for the police is only a symptom of a malaise that runs very deep, to the very core of Western society. In Europe, decades of profligacy, waste and incompetent government abetted by bankers so blinded by their own greed they could not see – or, more likely, didn't care about – the coming collapse of the euro zone have led to a breakdown of order in Greece, with rumblings of anger and dissent ready to burst forth in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, France and even Germany. Meanwhile in the US, what began as a quiet protest in New York City against the collusion of finance and government shovelling the nation's wealth away from the masses and into the pockets of a tiny few has swelled to such a level, thanks largely to police incompetence and ham-fistedness, that even CNN can no longer ignore it.

As is typical of CNN, though, it has completely missed the point of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. It sent a young reporter down to Zuccotti Park where, as veteran anchor Jim Clancy stroked his chin and nodded wisely, she found a lack of any "coherent" message from the protesters (who she claimed, amazingly, appeared to be outnumbered by media folk, even though the protest had been barely covered until the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge).

This lack of "coherence" of Occupy Wall Street has emerged as something of a theme, now that the movement, in the words of The Independent, has become "too big to ignore". Self-described British "leftie" Brendan O'Neill, in one of the most mean-spirited and scathing attacks on the protest to date, wrote in his Telegraph blog that the occupiers "spend their time spreading all sorts of demented conspiracy theories about modern political life. 'Corporations … run our governments', they claim, indulging in a David Icke–like fantasy that faceless men-in-suits puppeteer the political sphere. Apparently these evil men, not content with making squillions of dollars and starting billions of wars, have also 'poisoned the food supply through negligence', inflicted 'cruel treatment on countless non-human animals', and 'purposefully covered up oil spills'."

But it is the very incoherence sneered at by these reports that speaks most loudly of the unrest rumbling, like a dormant volcano, too far below the surface for behind-the-curve analysts to hear. They are like someone who criticizes an AIDS sufferer dying of pneumonia: "He is just lashing out, complaining about his lesions at one point, then about his inability to breathe, then about HIV, then about the fact that he can't afford antiretroviral drugs. And when pressed, he can't offer any cure for AIDS."

It is the disease itself that is incoherent: an economic system built first on paper, then on bubbles, and now on unsustainable debt repackaged and resold as "derivatives", while the basic necessities of life – food, shelter and health – are so downgraded in importance that vast numbers of people in what used to be called the Third World (now the "developing" world, though what it is "developing" into is never explained) don't have these things at all, while more and more people in the once-prosperous West are losing them.

The police in New York, or Vancouver or Toronto or Athens or Chelsea, are not the problem. They are only the armed force of a system that is not simply broken, it is shattered. Their pepper-spray canisters, their truncheons, Tasers and guns are powerless against the volcano, which must eventually erupt. Will it be a Pinatubo, a Mount St Helens, or merely a plume of noxious gas that quickly peters out? Only time will tell, but it's down there, it's down there somewhere. CNN and Brendan O'Neill just can't hear it yet.