Michael Oher, offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, was online on Wednesday night when his Twitter feed started filling up with tributes to Steve Jobs. A bewildered Oher tweeted: “Can somebody help me out? Who was Steve Jobs!”
He was on his iPhone at the time.
Who was Steve Jobs? Well, he was a guy who founded a corporation and spent his life as a corporate executive manufacturing corporate products. So he wouldn’t have endeared himself to the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, even though, underneath the patchouli and lentils, most of them are abundantly accessorized with iPhones and iPads and iPods loaded with iTunes, if only for when the drum circle goes for a bathroom break.
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The above is a somewhat obvious point, although the fact that it’s not obvious even to protesters with an industrial-strength lack of self-awareness is a big part of the problem. But it goes beyond that: If you don’t like to think of Jobs as a corporate exec (and a famously demanding one at that), think of him as a guy who went to work, and worked hard. There’s no appetite for that among those “occupying” Zuccotti Park. In the old days, the tribunes of the masses demanded an honest wage for honest work. Today, the tribunes of America’s leisured varsity class demand a world that puts “people before profits.” If the specifics of their “program” are somewhat contradictory, the general vibe is consistent: They wish to enjoy an advanced Western lifestyle without earning an advanced Western living. The pampered, elderly children of a fin de civilisation overdeveloped world, they appear to regard life as an unending vacation whose bill never comes due.
So they are in favor of open borders, presumably so that exotic Third World peasants can perform the labor to which they are noticeably averse. Of the 13 items on that “proposed list of demands,” Demand Four calls for “free college education,” and Demand Eleven returns to the theme, demanding debt forgiveness for all existing student loans. I yield to no one in my general antipathy to the racket that is American college education, but it’s difficult to see why this is the fault of the mustache-twirling robber barons who head up Global MegaCorp, Inc. One sympathizes, of course. It can’t be easy finding yourself saddled with a six-figure debt and nothing to show for it but some watery bromides from the “Transgender and Colonialism” class. Americans collectively have north of a trillion dollars in personal college debt. Say what you like about Enron and, er, Solyndra and all those other evil corporations, but they didn’t relieve you of a quarter-mil in exchange for a master’s in Maya Angelou. So why not try occupying the dean’s office at Shakedown U?
Ah, but the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at. At Liberty Square, one of the signs reads: “F**k your unpaid internship!” Fair enough. But, to a casual observer of the massed ranks of Big Sloth, it’s not entirely clear what precisely anyone would ever pay them to do.
Do you remember Van Jones? He was Obama’s “green jobs” czar back before “green jobs” had been exposed as a gazillion-dollar sinkhole for sluicing taxpayer monies to the president’s corporate cronies. Oh, don’t worry. These cronies aren’t “corporate” in the sense of Steve Jobs. The corporations they run put “people before profits”: That’s to say, they’ve figured out it’s easier to take government money from you people than create a business that makes a profit. In an amusing inversion of the Russian model, Van Jones became a czar after he’d been a Communist. He became a Commie in the mid-Nineties — i.e., after even the Soviet Union had given up on it. Needless to say, a man who never saw a cobwebbed collectivist nostrum he didn’t like no matter how long past its sell-by date is hot for “Occupy Wall Street.” Indeed, Van Jones thinks that the protests are the start of an “American Autumn.”
An excellent disputation of the inchoate demands of the sock-hats (chausette chapeaux). What struck me was your comment that Steve Jobs innovation in computers is 'what got his juices going'. Perhaps at the end of the day this is what is so chillingly absent; the intrinsic curiosity about the world and what makes it work. Van Jones is just another marketing buffoon trying to create a demand so he can flog his goods to what he thinks are the marks conditioned by a society enervated by its own success.
In reading about Steve Jobs early life, I learned he made a visit to India:
"Steve was joined by his hippie friend from Reed, Dan Kottke, and they went to India in search for enlightenment. They came back pretty disappointed, especially after they met a famous guru, Kairolie Baba, who, unlike what they expected, was a con man.
'We weren’t going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened. It was one of the first times that I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Baba put together." quoted in Michael Moritz's The Little Kingdom
I see the protests as a Democratic/ Union astroturf operation. Obama is throwing his wall street allies under the campaign bus in order to get reelected. He is going to take away their interest income when he and Bernanke execute a mass refi of all mortgages in the US. He wants to bully Congress into passing the millionaire tax. The Unions are continuing the Wisconsin battle nationwide.
There is a problem with embracing protests too openly, though. These things can run away from their organizers and become incredibly violent, like a campfire in a forest of dry tinder. What happens when gangs of real serious thugs decide to join the party?
@ Andrew P: "What happens when gangs of real serious thugs decide to join the party?"
Like the ones in the street gangs in 10 American cities who have been armed with automatic weapons by the Obama administration in the 'Fast and Furious' horror show?
Somehow I doubt the indomitable Mr. Jones made a poor branding choice. He wishes for nothing short of an American Autumn, so that we stop damaging holy mother earth and so that the evil white power structure gets it's comeuppance.
Caught a glimpse of him in all his airbrushed magnificence on an incredibly execrable program on the History Channel called Earth 2100. Van the Man (who is probably deeply troubled that he is a member of the genus and species homo sapiens) spouted his anthroporphic drivel for about the three seconds it took my remote to change the channel (three seconds because apparently the batteries in the remote need changing).
Make whatever disparaging remarks you want to about the hippies of the 60's or Nixon, but in the late 60's sections of major cities burnt and the National Guard shot students! Whether anything worthwhile was accomplished is questionable, but at least there was some conviction on both sides. Today's demonstrators, and the establishment reaction, are about as impressive as rival preschool picnics.
That is because the "Occupy Wall Street" is a White House stalking horse in order to create a situation where people will be begging the regime to restore order.They are creating a crisis that they will then move to solve.
This movement is the "intellectual" brain child of SEIU stooge Steven Lerner.
They have laundered this asrtoturf debacle through a heretofore moribund web based group to give it the appearance of a grass roots movement but you see that all the usual suspects are pimping for what can only be described as a annulment of all property rights in the United States.
If these college "students" think their education should be free they must by definition think it is of no value. Education is not a right it's a commodity in that it must be provided to you by the efforts someone else. To take that effort or to require someone else to pay for that effort is confiscation and is both illegal(at the present) and immoral(in perpetuity).
As Mr Steyn says why don't these "students" go and ask the "professors" who came up with such nonsense to give the "students" the benefits of their "wisdom" at no cost. After all it is the salaries of these wizards of smart that drive the cost of this higher indoctrination. The left is oh so fond of identifying root causes. This in one they studiously ignore as the phonies in academia hide behind the insolent illiterates they have so lovingly and studiously educated into being incurious, stark, raving imbeciles.
Remove the middle man and have the brain-trust in academia that give rise to the whirlwind reap the consequences of the whirlwind.
I don't see these hypocrites in academia or the elites and favored foot soldiers in government ever offering to giving their so called services away.As a matter of fact they insist we pay them at the penalty of being imprisoned.
For sure. Having your children sent to war against their will, there to die for a theory Foggy Bottom thought up is a far cry from "we are the 99%" rubbish of today. I'm also part of the 99% and I know that profits are needed to put people first. The ignorance of basic economics is embarrassing.
The Wall Street Protest shakes out to be a new Zombie movie: "Three Weeks of the Living Dead" aka "Get a Life!" Where is a hurricane in NYC when you need one to take out the trash?
Again Mr Steyn has hit the nail on the head. The zombie-like un-washed protesters are clue-less about what makes the economy run. They are being led around by their noses (still). I want everything and I want it now. Take the cameras and the reporters away (noone really cares at this point) and most are tired of the mess. Another few days of their own stench and they'll all go off to some other mindless project, lead by the socialist/liberal organizers.
Sorry, your sense of irony is lost on me. Why don't you try using straight-forward sentence construction? Maybe whatever point you are making might be recognizable.
What? That some knew who Jobs was but then spend the rest of the time railing against everything he accomplished and the way he did it?
No irony lost, unless you wish to take issue with Steyn not stating that at least a few of the deadbeats knew who the benefactor of their electronic world was. The irony perhaps goes even further in that the benefactor of the cash making all this possible is a speculator of the highest degree who hates America and is trying to tear it down. Not to make it more "just" but to make it go away.
Is Steyn beating the same drum again? Perhaps. That no one else in the MSM is saying anything similarly is just cause for more despair.
If by "incoherent screed" you mean amazingly insightful and hysterically witty, I'm right there with you. Your link directed me to a nauseatingly self indulgent pity party, which matches the finer elements at OWS. That site actually reinforces Mr. Steyn's point. If you are looking for a grass roots movement to hitch your wagon to, I'd suggest strongly that you look elsewhere!
Maybe when these people start protesting in Washington DC, where the root of a lot of our economic problems stem from, and get rid of that sophmoric excuse for a list of demands, they will then be taken seriously.
As it stands now, I think "Big Sloth" describes this group perfectly.
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