Drummers At Zucotti Park: Let's Face Facts, This Movement Is All About The Drumming

Depressed? Via Hot Air, (actually, Truman North notes, it's been on this site's sidebar since this morning), an instant smile.

The organizers tried to limit drumming to two hours a day. Because a nearby school could not teach with all the racket. And a lot of protesters themselves objected to the all-night drumming marathons -- a lot of people couldn't sleep.

This did not go over well with the drummers. And then the issue went from drumming to money.

But the drums were fun. They brought in publicity and money. Many non-facilitators were infuriated by the decision and claimed that it had been forced through the General Assembly.

“They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music," said Seth Harper, an 18-year-old from Georgia. “The GA decided to do it ... they suppressed people’s opinions. I wanted to do introduce a different proposal, but a big black organizer chick with an Afro said I couldn’t.”

To Shane Engelerdt, a 19-year-old from Jersey City and self-described former “head drummer,” this amounted to a Jacobinic betrayal. “They are becoming the government we’re trying to protest," he said. "They didn’t even give the drummers a say ... Drumming is the heartbeat of this movement. Look around: This is dead, you need a pulse to keep something alive.”

The drummers claim that the finance working group even levied a percussion tax of sorts, taking up to half of the $150-300 a day that the drum circle was receiving in tips. “Now they have over $500,000 from all sorts of places,” said Engelerdt. “We’re like, what’s going on here? They’re like the banks we’re protesting."

Also an issue: Cleaning up after themselves. Some protesters will not do any cleaning. Other protesters will not even move their stuff so that the area can be cleaned. (Of course, when you put your stuff in a common pile, it quickly gets stolen.)

So there is some tension between the more conscientious and less conscientious among the protesters.

Which leads to this hysterical quote.

“When cleanups happen, people get mad,” Glaser said. “This is its own city. Within every city there are people who freeload, who make people’s lives miserable. We just deal with it. We can’t kick them out.”

I forget who it was who joked that the protesters were essentially learning the lessons of civilization as they built a society, and a politics, and a leadership structure on the fly. But maybe it's not just a joke. Here you have committed anarchists and Marxists learning about private property and externalities.

And a lot of about chronic freeloaders, and how they kind of suck.

Reliving The Arc of History: I may have been thinking of this Bryan Preston article.

The inevitable raids on their stuff by homeless addicts vomiting their way across the makeshift camps has already given rise to a kind of Occupy camp security, the most basic duty of a government. And note, one that isn’t being performed well on our border, but the Occupiers don’t care about that. Next will come a kind of feudalism, as various Occupation (without vocation) voices vie for power and control and minions form factions. And after that, the revolution will become just another institution. That’s the arc of history, being played out by college students who probably don’t even know enough history to be able to grasp the irony of it all.

Until the Occupiers vault from their primitive state to a Leninist oligarchy (a process which should take another week or so), supposing they don’t just dissolve once they realize that camping out in urban parks paid for by others is no way to go through life or feed yourself, let’s enjoy their principled devotion to Luddism...

posted by Ace at 03:46 PM

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