Life as Crisis Management: FedEx, Again

 

It happens like clock work. Every month I am reminded that we live in Franz Kafka’s world, that we live in Vladimir Voinovich’s world, that we live in a postmodernist world of bureaucratic absurdity. I was reminded of this yet again this week thanks to FedEx.

As some of you may know I love classical music. As some of you may also know I hate Amazon. Given this I try to order classical CDs from another source. Usually that other source is Presto Classical, an independent music store in England.

A week ago Presto Classical was having a half price clearance sale on Hyperion CDs, a classical label I admire and love. Time to buy alert. I bit. I ordered a tonne or a slew of Hyperion CD’s from Presto, so many, in fact, that I got the express FedEx delivery rather than the slower USPS one. Everything went swimmingly until the package of CDs got to US customs.

On Monday, American Memorial Day, I got a call from FedEx that took me aback (I initially thought it might be fake) because I had never experienced such a thing. They asked me how large the package of CDs I ordered from Presto was. As I had not packed the package I had no idea what its measurements were. I told them to contact Presto, they who actually packaged the package or to simply measure it themselves (the common sense approach). But that, of course, to paraphrase Faith in Buffy's body, would be wrong.

I tried to get hold of Presto but Monday was a holiday in Britain too. So, I estimated the size of the package (two rows of 5.5 inch CDs with safety packing material equals 14 inches wide. On Wednesday I finally head from Presto. They told me they send the measurements to FedEx and that my package would move through customs soon. As of [Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday...) morning it has not moved at all. Fingers are, however crossed.

Anyway short story short, this is the second time I have been screwed by FedEx. I am sure time number three will be coming soon. Why? Because, to put it colloquially, FedEx sucks. Oh and another thing, the FedEx representatives I spoke to had very thick accents something that proved problematic for a 71 year old without 18 year old hearing. 

In the end I am left to ask why the package was allowed to move from England to the US without the dimensions of the package if FedEx needed the dimensions of the package? The answer, I must assume, is because we live in the world of Franz Kafka and Vladimir Voinovich. 

Update: My CD's finely arrived nine days after they were supposed to thanks to FedEx. The morons at FedEx, however, had one more surprise for me. FedEx had somewhere along the line transferred my CD's from the package they were sent in to one that was far too big for the items. You can probably guess what happened. If you guess the discs arrived damaged you would be right. I immediately contacted the seller and sender, sent them pictures of the damaged discs ,and told them they should claim insurance for the damage and/or sue FedEx for their incompetence and idiocies. Let's hear it for American capitalism.

The Books of My Life: John Sayles (Molyneaux)

Modern and postmodern life is inherently absurd. Since human life is absurd it is also, as the reflecive person grasps, sometimes annoying. One of the most annoying aspects of human life, in my humble opinion, are critics, particularly literary, film, and television critics.

Critics, of course, come in all shapes, sizes, and flavours just like toothpaste and Jello. There are, for example, at least since the rise of the new digital media that can be used to make money, the casual amateur reactor who reads books and watches films and television programmes and reacts to them for money”. As a general rule the reactors to books are the best of this digital age species.

There are the fanboy and fangirl critics many of whom actually know something about the production aspects of what they read and watch because as fans they scour the  world for primary source material about the writer, director, and creator of the novels, films, and shows they adore. They generally turn the writer of the book, the director of a film, or the writer-creator of the show into a saint (and a sinner once he or she sins like all humans invariably do). Much of their knowledge, their cultural capital, about the making of a novel, a film, or a television show, comes from interviews with those involved with whatever they are reading or watching along with second hand sources such as biographies.

Then there are the academic critics. Academic critics come in several stripes. There are those, a minority, who actually do primary research on an author, a film director, or a television show creator. Generally speaking these critics try to put films or television shows into economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical contexts. As I said these literary, film, and television historians, these social scientists, of art and commerce, are few. 

There are the crystal ball textualists of which there are, these days, many. Crystal ball textualism, the dominant or hegemonic strain of literary, film, and television theory academics have been socialised into and trained in these days, is not grounded on extensive contextual descriptive analysis. Crystal ball textualism assumes that everything you want and need to know about a novel, a short story, a film, or a television programme, can be found in the finished text itself. The finished text is what these wizards with special knowledge peer into in order to immediately decipher any text by teasing out the psychoanalytic dream worlds, the ethnic aspects, the racial aspects, and the gender aspects of the text they are peering at. They are aided and abetted in this task by the theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches they have been socialised into. This means that they, unlike more intense fan boy and fan girl critics, generally pay only limited attention to primary source materials beyond the text.

Each of these critic cultures are fundamentally cultural and ideological. They are strongly normative and value laden though many would not admit this. Some critics, many of whom seen to be wanna be writers of books and wanna be makers of films and television programmes tend to whinge and whine about movies they find too talky and with too little camera movement and editing. For them such talky and static movies are theatrical, a term of derision for them, and not cinematic because they are too talky and have too few cuts and camera movements (both of which seem to become moral forces for them). The fact is, however, and to the contrary, anything put on film is a moving picture, is a piece of cinema. Moreover, there is nothing inherently evil about a film with intelligent talk and limited editing, limited cuts, and limited camera movements. See Rear Window.

Another thing academics, particularly academic crystal ball textualists whinge and whine about as they study novels, short stories, films and television, shows is that aren’t politically and ideologically correct their politically and ideologically correct. For them any novel, short story, film, or TV show that isn’t anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-classist is inherently bad if not evil at least to some extent. For them progress is tied to a decline in racism, sexism, and classism. And while I agree with Richard Roud (“Introduction" to Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980) that all criticism has normative aspects to it and while I have no problem with critiquing and criticising various forms of ethnocentrism in media texts, all cultural analysis, in my opinion, should be tempered by and grounded on sound descriptive analysis and primary documentary evidence before one moves on to interpretation and homiletics. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that all forms of criticism are equally normative and equally ideologically correct. The critics with the least cultural and ideological baggage are those historians and social scientists who do have the capital or at least some of the cultural capital to explore the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of “texts” and who do engage in primary research, film historians and social scientists like Gerry Molyneaux whose book on the independent film director, writer, and actor John Sayles I recently read. Molyneaux’s John Sayles: The Unauthorized Biography of the Pioneering Indie Filmmaker (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 2000) was, for me, a welcome antidote to the crystal ball textualism that dominates academic criticism these days and the ignorance is bliss reactions of YouTube reactors. Molyneaux explores Sayles’s life from birth to his latest film, which was, at the time the book was published, Limbo (1999). He takes readers on a journey that starts with Sayles’s birth in upstate New York through his work on Roger Corman films through his life as a writer, script doctor and through his life as a film director. He rightly notes that Sayles and others of an independent bent were stimulated by the fiercely independent cinema of writer, director, and actor John Cassavetes who, like Sayles, often wrote and acted in order to make money to fund his own cheaply, by Hollywood standards, made films, that were accused by some of being too talky and too primitive cinematically by some at the time.

What sets Molyneaux’s book apart from many other film studies monographs past and present is its focus on the broader social contexts of Sayles’s life and work. Monlyneaux nicely explores the economic contexts of Sayles’s films all of which were made for six million dollars or less, sometimes a lot less. He nicely explores the role Sayles’s partner, Maggie Renzi, played in obtaining funding for these independent films in an economic context that was often dynamic making raising funds difficult. He notes that Sayles often financed all or a good part of his films himself. He points out that whether Sayles’s films made a return on investment—often they did not—this translated into further difficulties  for him and Renzi to get money to make the films he wanted to make. He nicely explores what might be called the leftist political orientation of Sayles’s films such as the pro-unionism of Matewan (1987) and Eight Men Out (1988), the ethnic focus and ideological complexity of Lone Star (1996), and the humanism of Men With Guns (1998). He explores Sayles’s commitment to making films his way. He explores Sayles’s sometimes problems with the suits that ran the Hollywood studios and Sayles as scriptwriter and script doctor for hire, sometimes for the studios. Sayles, for instance, as Molyneaux notes, made Baby It’s You (Paramount, 1983) and he was the creator and show runner of short lived television show Shannon’s Deal (NBC, 1989-1990) for NBC,  the former, in particular, left a bad taste in Sayles’s artistic mouth. He explores Sayles’s career as writer of short stories and novels. He explores Sayles as actor. All of these—Sayles as a script writer, Sayles as a script doctor, Sayles as a writer of novels and short stories, and Sayles as an actor—helped Sayles make monies to fund his own films. He explores the theme of community in Sayles’s work and the complexities and ambiguities of Sayles’s work. He notes Sayles’s interest in race, in ethnicity, in class, and in unions, something that should earn Sayles a legion of politically and ideologically correct academic fans but doesn’t seem to have. In Sayles’s films so much if not all is on the surface and crystal ball textualists generally prefer directors who make them dig beneath the surface given that they perceive themselves as kind of cine-psychoanalysts with a social conscience.

Sayles has gone on to write further novels and films and direct further films since Molyneaux’s book was published foregrounding the fact that Sayles is still an artistic work in progress and that analysis of Sayles’s work is also a work in progress and so any conclusions about his work must remain tentative. He limitedly explores the criticisms of Sayles as a dialogue director rather than a cinematic director though he notes rightly that financial realities place limits on the equipment one can obtain and the film stock one can use, something that many of the critics who seem to think that films are made in an economic vacuum forget. Many if not all of these critics still think of art and the artist in romantic terms, as unsullied by the real world. Whether Sayles and Renzi will be able to put together what is necessary for Sayles to make another film remains an open question as I type given the realities of contemporary big money Hollywood film making and the difficulties in making independent films and getting them distributed these days. Perhaps streaming will come to the rescue. Only time will tell.

Molyneaux’s book on Sayles may not be as academically and intellectually sexy as books that come from the crystal ball textualists (some clearly find crystal ball textualists work sexy). It nicely lays out the actual economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of Sayles’s film. It provides a sound base line for further studies of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of the work of writer, director, and actor John Sayles even if, like fanboy and fangirl criticism, it tends to be too often more laudatory than critical. And while we like what we like—and I admit I like Sayles’s films a lot—what we like needs to be grounded in an analysis of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of life. Finally, Molyneaux’s book raises that eternal question about books on film directors: couldn’t it have done what it did in article and hence less repetitive form?
 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Californication, Disneyfornication, Googlefornication...

 

YouTube! Edward Abbey once is supposed to have said that "[s]ociety is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top”. YouTube and other social media prove the truth of that quote every second of every minute of everyday thanks to their generally vacuous, mundane, banal, and at best, mediocre recraperation videos. Scum, as social media shows, generally does indeed rise to the top.

Quakers, of course, have long talked of the need of speaking truth to power. In thie era of continuing mediocrity and of mediocrates slumming for monies on YouTube, which, in turn, makes monies off of the banal, the mediocre, the mundane, and the ill researched videos they broadcast--lest we forget, YouTube is home of never ending if more readily available digitalised opium--it is long past time to speak truth to those who believe and those who enable videos grounded in the fallacious notion that anything said is worth saying. It isn't. Of course, I do realise the quantity of quality digital media is, historically speaking, no less or no greater than the quantity of quality books, television, or movies. There isn't much quality anywhere in the mass media world. The crap, however, is more widely spread on the stale bread producing hallucinations that is social media. And nowhere is this fact more in evidence in the core nation world than in the not so mythical kingdom of media bread and circuses, the USofA, that home of Califonication, Disneyfornication, and now Googlefornication. 

Golly gee that is something to be proud of. I hope the employees of Google, land also of paternalistic censorship, are basking in the glorious and radiant heat of their brown hole sun.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Social Media in an Age of Narcissism and Anti-Intellectualism

In Alfred Hitchcock's superb film Rear Window a broken legged Jimmy Stewart who is stuck in a cast because of an accident he suffered while photographing a car race, sits in his wheelchair and stares at the windows (metaphorical cinema screens) across his quardrangle. As he, Scotty, gazes again and again at the windows across his courtyard he begins to do what we humans often do. He begins to construct stories--whether they are real or unreal we are unsure at first and even to some extent at the end of the movie--about the people and the situations they have gotten themselves into behind each of those rear windows. Today, the voyeuristic and narrative ("reality") constructing society Hitchcock explored in Rear Window dominates digital media sites like YouTube. On digital platforms like YouTube voyeurs voyeur and those being voyeured act out--whether in deep acting mode or surface acting mode is sometimes unclear--various scenes from their own movie about their own "real life" hoping, in the process, that by allowing voyeurs to voyeur them they can earn the crumbs (and to find perhaps simultaneously an online community of the like minded) offered by our new digital bosses (much the same as the old bosses) thanks to the "reactions" they put up for all the voyeuring "public" to see. 

Much of what these voyeur mes put up on their social media pages is almost as old as humankind itself. Sensationalists like Inside of You Clips and Sarah Z sensationalise for fun and (California dreaming) profits. Demagogues like Milo Yiannopoulos demagogue about the political, ideological, and cultural things that have proven to be successful in manipulating the gullible masses. Some of them are presumably even congnisant of the fact that they are playing a game. Those demagogued follow along after their cultural masters repeating the apologetic and polemical mantras their pied pipers have loudly whispered into their ears. Whingers and whiners, like Books and BlueStockings, spew emotional hatred and ad hominems at, for example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Joss Whedon, with little of anything empirical, systematic, analytical, or substantive in their rants. In fact, posters like Books and BlueStockings foreground the empirical fact that many if not most of these voyeur mes have not grasped the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder. Even many of the posts that are actually grounded, if limitedly, in empirical facts end up being, as is the case, for example, with posts by Ronnie Bradley on Buffy, limitedly empirical, selectively empirical, and ultimately overdetermined by ideology and political correctness, making such posts more polemical than empirical and analytical. Decently done if limitedly exegetical reaction posts by those of SofieReacts, the LexiCrowd Thor, and Andy and Alex, though grounded in textual rather than political and ideological correct analysis, evince little understanding of the broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, geographic, and historical contexts of that to which they are reacting, approaches that make many YouTube reactions variants of fundamentalist textual literalism. In the end, so much of what is on social media sites like YouTube suggests very strongly that social media sites are the real vast wastelands of the core nation world, wastelands with only thin and microscopic intellectual oases (I am thinking here of the wonderful Fil from Wings of Pegasus, the amazing Clever Dick and his superb Doctor Who histories, Overthink Podcast, and others like them who do research and preparation for their videos) lying in the interstices of its vast intellectual deserts.

Tucker Carlson, Twit of the Year

Tucker Carlson, with his claim to have a monopoly on Western values--he doesn't--his apocalyptic chicken little rhetoric that the sky is falling--it isn't--and his utopian rhetoric that eden is just over that rise--it isn't--is an all too typical and all rather common example of a right wing demagogue in the late modern and early postmodern eras, an era which has seen an increase in demographic diversity, cultural fragmentation and narcissism (both Cryer Tuck and Dissembling Donald are cut from this cloth), and a global corporate economy in the core nation West.  In fact, his claim to be the guardian of a parochial conception of Western values--one that is inherently intolerant and brooks no contradiction--his claim that the end is nigh--an end that for two thousand years has never been nigh--and his edenic utopian opiate of the masses discourse come right out of the playbook of prehistoric and early historic Mediterranean theocracy.

So too, of course, does Carlson's anti-Semtitism. Carlson's posh toff meets populism anti-Semitism is likewise the product of Mediterranean theocracy as it was institutionalised in an imperial and intolerant Roman Empire in "decay" or in change. Like all instances of such scapegoating, including claims that Jews were drinking the blood of Christian children and poisoning wells, such claims are bullshite. They ultimately all function as the emotional appeals of true believing demagogues or consciously gobshitting cynical or machiavellian bullshitters to rev up the emotions of the anti-intellectual mob so to attain power (Gimme, Gimme, Gimme), prestige (I wanna be adored), and/or financial gain (let's make lots of money).



Carlson's posh toff meets populism demagoguery is also--and this perhaps has an even longer pedigree than Mediterranean theocracy--hypocritical. Carlson and those of his ends justify the means ilk praise their values while damning to hell the same or similar values in others. They praise their priestly money changers while consigning to hell the financial backers of causes with which they disagree and which are as much a product of Western values, non-theocratic Western values in this instance, as their intolerant Western values. 

In the end, old Cryer Tuck is nothing but a good old time pot and kettle if with a silver spoon stuck up his arse. And like the gilded silver crap Swanson dinners are served on, that silver spoon is ultimately fool's gold.

The Books of My Life: Totalitarianism

Abbott Gleason’s Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) is a largely dispassionate exploration and analysis of the origins, life, and ups and downs, of the idea “totalitarian” since it arose in the 1920s as an apologetic and polemical way to “describe” fascist Italy. As Gleason notes the term became more prominent in the 1930s, particularly in application to Nazi Germany, became a prominent way to characterise the USSR during the Cold War, declined in academic usage after the cultural revolution in the 1960s, was resurrected by neoconservative polemicists in the era from Reagan to the fall of the USSR, an era of increased tension between the great powers of the US and USSR, and has become somewhat popular in post-Soviet Russia, in part, as a way to assuage feelings of guilt.

There are a number of things I took away from Gleason’s informative book though I am not sure how happy he would be about what I took away from it. Gleason’s book shows that the term “totalitarian” has been, particularly since the 1940s, one of those key symbols that Cultural Anthropologists sometimes talk about, symbols that reveal much about their societies and cultures in general because they interact with, interweave with, intertwine with, and give meaning to a host of other political, economic, and cultural symbols in those societies and cultures. As Gleason’s book shows, the key symbol “totalitarian” became politically, economically, and culturally central during the Cold War in the West and particularly to the United States. Currently, the ideologically loaded term "dictatorship" seems to have replaced "totalitarian" in demagogic discourse.

As a key symbol in the West and the US “totalitarian” worked or functioned, particularly on the political policy, journalistic, and popular levels, in a Manichean "us" versus them way. For many polemical users of the symbolic term "totalitarian", the West and the US, were “democratic” while Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the USSR, or Stalin era USSR, were “totalitarian”. For many polemical users of the symbolic term we, the“free nations”, were “free”, while they, the "totalitarian" states, were not. For many polemical users of the term we, the "free" nations were "good" while they, the "bad" states, were not. For many polemical users of the term they, the "totalitarian" nations, “brainwashed” their subjects, while we, the “free nations”, respected and treasured "freedom of "speech" and "freedom of thought". For many polemical users of the term we, the "free nations" are “civilised” while they, the "totalitarian" states, are "brutal" and "thuggish" bringers of "terror". For many polemical users of the term we “democracies” and  “free nations”, respect human rights while they, "totalitarian" states, did not. Such symbolic binary formulations like these, by the way, miss several things. They miss that even during the more egalitarian days of American New Deal liberalism and the post-World War II Atlee era of Labour dominance in the United Kingdom, “free nations” were—and still are—oligarchic. They miss that every group or society that survives socialises its "citizens" in both coercive and more non-coercive ways, that some societies or groups socialise more intensely while others socialise less intensely, and that all human groups and societies socialise for conformity.

Gleason shows that the tern “totalitarian” has been used polemically and academically in inconsistent ways. For some Nazi Germany was “totalitarian”. For some the USSR was “totalitarian”. For some Nazi Germany and the Stalin era Soviet Union were “totalitarian”. For some Japan, Argentina, Spain, and Portugal were, during their years of military rule, “totalitarian”. For others these nations were “authoritarian”. The latter, claimed those polemicists, many of who were ensconced in government positions, who made the distinction between “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” regimes, assumed that “totalitarianism” was new and that “authoritarian” regimes could be transformed while "totalitarian" ones could not be transformed.  For some, as early as the 1930s, not only were Nazi Germany and the USSR “totalitarian”, so was US New Deal liberalism. Needless to say, the demonisation of American liberalism has become increasingly prominent in 21^st century American neoconservative polemical circles. Ignoring the "terror" of "authoritarian" regimes was functional in a world divided into us, the "free world", those who are with us ("authoritarians" who will become more like us over time), and them, the "totalitarian" Communist bloc. 

Gleason shows that the symbolic term “totalitarian” has been used in a largely ahistorical and hence problematic way. Those who use the term miss that, as Max Weber noted, that supposedly “rational” bureaucracies are one of the central characteristics of a modernity that became dominate in the modern West, including in the USSR, and remains a central component in a postmodernity brought about, in large part, by the advent of new digital communications technologies which became important in the postmodern West. In the final analysis, I would argue, it is best to see “totalitarianism” as the modern form of "autocracy" rather than as something new as many polemicists would have it. The fact that so many of those, whether of the polemical or more academic variety, used the "totalitarian" use as a synonym for "despotism" and "autocracy" strongly suggests that "totalitarianism" was not new, despite the protestations of some, and that it was simply the old "autocracy" and "despotism" dressed up in modern demagogues clothing. The "autocratic" modern USSR, it turns out, by the way, was unable to adapt to the new postmodernist realities of globalisation and digital communications media. Given all this, I think we have to conclude, that the symbolic term "totalitarian", was, for many Western polemicists, consciously or unconsciously, a means to strike fear into the emotion laden hearts and minds of the masses in an era of modern mass propaganda and continuing great power competitions.

Fascinating book. Highly recommended.

Our Masters Voices...Musings on Doublespeak in Corporate America

Living in Corporate America, which, George Calin once said, "was bought and sold and paid for years ago", is a trip. Here in the land of doublespeak some people can be beaten and pepper sprayed simply for "camping" in parks while those who camp and wait for Black Friday deals, entertainment tickets, or sports tickets, often on public sidewalks, are a media item as Naomi Wolf says in her recent article. And most citizens, or should I say most consumers since that is what corporate America sees us as, don't even see or hear the corporate lies right in front of them.

Naomi Wolf in her Guardian piece lists several things Occupy has called for. "...No 1: get the money out of politics". Occupy protestors urge this reform as a response to the Citizens United court ruling "which allowed boundless sums of [corporate] monies to enter the campaign process". Number 2 "reform...the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation." In particular Occupy calls for the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, "the Depression-era law, eliminated during the Clinton administration, "that separates investment banks from commercial banks". "This law", claims Occupy, "would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create...derivatives out of thin air and wipe out the commercial and savings bank" sector. Number 3 Occupy pass "laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors”. Number 4, one Wolf doesn't discuss, to move your monies from too big to fail banks like CitiBank and Bank of America, banks involved in creating derivative and real estate bubbles out of thin air and banks which continue to pay their investment labour force millions in bonuses, to local credit unions and community banks. Clearly, as Wolf notes and as anyone with eyes can see, Occupy has a political programme.

So why is it that the talking heads on TV, on the radio, and in the blogosphere keep claiming that Occupy has no "plan" when Occupy, as Wolf notes again and again, clearly has several plans to reform Washington? So why this charade? Could it be that corporate America and its political minions, particularly on the right, and its demagogues are sticking to a message and keep promoting it even in the face of empirical data to the contrary? Could it be that the fiction that Occupy has no plan is exactly what America's elites want to manipulate the "silent majority" into believing? Is this fiction becoming reality just another example of postmodernist manipulation in the service of corporate control and power? And why are the media not challenging the falsehoods being peddled and parroted by the the handmaidens of Corporate America? Is it because media news readers and news men and women simply aren't aware of this data? If so why not? Or is it because the media are simply parroting the corporate party line manufactured by the public relations courtiers of the corporate class in a regimented way that was not even possible in the Stalin era USSR? After all Big Media are controlled by and large by corporations and America's public broadcaster, PBS, has to be careful that it doesn't bite the hand that feeds it too hard because the hand that feeds sometimes bites back as PBS occasionally finds out? Is this the way the corporate media world goes round? And about that additional significant question: why are the masses swallowing this elite generated crap as though it was a chocolate truffle? Because postmodernist demagoguery in the service of economic and political elites creates reality even if that reality is patently false?

I am sure that Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist who once claimed that reality doesn't matter, that what really matters is what you can convince people is true, is enjoying all this doublespeak from the corporate class and its media acolytes about the Occupy movement and the fact that so many Americans seem to be eating it up wherever he is. After all before he died he trained a number of Corporate American technocratic spin doctors in the fine arts of demagoguery and reality manipulation including George W. Bush and Karl Rove.

Postscript
One blogger questioned Wolf's speculation that the Department of Homeland Security may have helped coordinate the military operations against Occupy movements in several American cities (http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/shocking-truth-about-factless-assertions). However I find it hard to escape the thesis that there was coordination between the police departments who ran Occupy out of Seattle, Portland, Oakland, the City. If not, why did they occur at around same time? Winter coming? They all realised that tents and tenters were hazardous to human health simultaneously? Jean Quan, the "activist" mayor of Oakland has, in fact, admitted that the offensive against Occupy was coordinated by "proper" authorities in eighteen cities (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpElRNEJPXshttp://www.mediaite.com/online/did-oakland-mayor-jean-quan-admit-cities-coordinated-to-bust-occupy-protests/, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I87roZGeGhw, ).

This raises the question of why did the militarised "forces of order" brutally push Occupy out of public and private spaces in similar ways? Coincidence? Accident? While Wolf's thesis is tentative and based on "coincidences" like those above it is an interesting thesis particularly given what we know about how the government worked in the past. Remember the centralised campaigns against dissidents in the 60s and 70s? Recall that the CIA and FBI helped quash dissidents? during the 60's and 70's?

Bibliography
Naomi Wolf, The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy, 25 November 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy?fb=optOut