Removing a movement: protected species must be handled with care

AS WE go to press, the state troopers and the cops are moving, in Los Angeles, to take out the Occupy LA folks. “Take them out” doesn’t mean shoot them.

It’s less lethal, more literal: just remove them.

Persuade them to fold up their little bulbous tents. Help them lift up their sentry box toilets. Take away all the evidence of their temporary presence and let Los Angeles get back to the daily grind without having to pass tented towns of the workless and disaffected, fronted by signs reading “This is not a protest, it’s a movement.”

If tonight’s evacuation of the protesters goes badly, the LAPD and the city administration will be up to their armpits in blame and heads will roll, just as the mitred heads of the lads in St Paul’s Cathedral in London rolled. The only safe way to deal with these protesters seems to be the one articulated centuries ago by Voltaire: “I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The modern equivalent of that fine principle seems to be “I hate you turning my city into a colourful dump but will defend to the death your right to camp right in front of some historic monument.”

That’s the only safe way to go, if you’re in charge of the terrain on which the protesters have set up their temporary homes. Any other approach loses you either your job or your reputation or both. Because, you see, the Occupy Wall Street/ LA/London/Wherever people have achieved an extraordinary public position. They are virtually impregnable, in public opinion terms.

They are a protected species partly because the rest of us attribute to them a valour and virtue we lack. Most of the people in the developed world are good and mad at the moment, and with good cause. But they’re in a bind. They’re like the guy who loses his marbles while presenting a live TV programme in the movie Network.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more,” he yells.

The rest of us are mad as hell, but we have no choice. We HAVE to take it, no matter what (to paraphrase Bill Clinton) “it” is. We have to keep working harder for less money to stay ahead of the mortgage, or we have to keep sending out the CVs to try to get a job paying half what our previous job paid us. Little hamsters on a caged wheel, we are. Good little hamsters, resigned to running faster on the wheel when Michael Noonan hands down the latest instalment of misery in the Budget. Wistful little hamsters, shamed by our own subservience and good behaviour, looking slightly enviously at the lads in the conical tents and getting vicarious thrills from the orderly disorder they represent.

The orderliness of their disorder matters. We identify, up to a point, with the protesters (sorry, movement) because they are not a bunch of drug-taking, violent, profane, filthy, reprobates. The Los Angeles guys, for example, have been willing to go along with the restrictions delineated by civic authorities in relation to litter and sanitation. They are not, in short, a different, threatening, dismissable Other species.

They are like ourselves, at least in the way they talk. This is helped by the fact that newspapers work so hard to find connections with them: “Oh, look, one of the protesters is Mary Robinson’s son! Imagine!” So there’s little to condemn about them. They are not The Other. They are a version of ourselves, elevated by their willingness to discomfit themselves in a way we can’t or won’t.

THEIR lack of hierarchy is another point in their favour. Humanity has a primeval hatred of taking orders and a matching dislike of hierarchies, that dislike elevated to hatred at periods when those temporarily vouchsafed power demonstrably fail to exercise it properly. At those times, movements always emerge which pride their collective selves on having no leadership, needing no leadership and committed for eternity to having no leadership. The fact that eternity never lasts longer than — at most — a couple of decades, never eliminates our baseless faith in leaderless disorganisation.

The lack of leadership and objectives means that media can’t get to grips with such movements. Because media people, in most western nations, tend to be left of centre, writers and programme-makers adopt a generally neutral to positive stance towards such protesters. In the early days, the reporters who get sent out stand on the outside of the protests stating the obvious.

Next step is tourism journalism as the reporters visit the sites and find out how the protesters are bedding in and how they’re keeping warm. Easily, is the current answer, and the mild winter thus far has been a gift to the protestors.

Even when media decides to get a bit more active, they significantly muffle the edge of their interrogation. Instead of putting straight tough questions to protestors, broadcasters hedge those questions around with phrases like: “But can’t you understand that members of the public might feel...?” They’re not politicians, you see, these protesters. They are a moral step above politicians, and so the generalised warbling guff about “alternatives” and “new thinking” and “fresh solutions” never gets challenged as it would if it came out of the mouth of a politician. Nobody asks protestors for specific examples of these alternatives and fresh solutions. Nobody asks them how these pious aspirations mesh with the achievements or lack of achievements in their past — as would happen if the protesters had taken the real risk of putting themselves up for election.

They get a free pass on all fronts, possibly because of a sense that they, too, will pass, and that the questions properly put to a public representative committed to a long-haul career would be wasted on people who have enough free time to sit in tents living on take-outs.

The places the protestors pick as their headquarters are interesting too. They select oddly old-fashioned sites. Historic tourist sites or locations central to the civic notion of the city. This, in turn, makes them easy and satisfactory to film: the bright temporary tents up against the magisterial stone work of St Paul’s makes for a neat visual contrast. They don’t tend to invade and set up their tents in, say, the Dundrum Shopping Centre or (in the US) in DisneyWorld or one of the massive shopping malls. Commerce is allowed to proceed, unimpeded, despite the reservations of the movement about commerce, commerciality and capitalism.

When it was announced that the LAPD planned to move last night against the Occupy LA protesters, it created little stir.

It seemed to be an inevitability. Wherever such protests gather, we expect them to end and we hope their end will be peaceful. We don’t want the protesters harmed, because they’re at least trying to let governments and financial VIPs know how we feel about being brought so low. And because their expressed rejection of position, power and profit is refreshing.

We do not want sledge-hammers applied to those little ‘nuts’.