by Doug Mainwaring
Nearly fifty years ago, Hollywood provided the perfect metaphor for understanding what we now see happening: in the classic 1956 science fiction motion picture Forbidden Planet, loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a twenty-third-century spaceship from Earth arrives on the planet Altair to rescue a reclusive but very kind, gentlemanly scientist and his beautiful daughter. The rescuers are soon menaced by an invisible monster who possesses unimaginable powers to terrify and destroy. In the end, we find out that the monster is actually the professor’s “id” made manifest as a powerful being, ravaging all those who threaten the utopia that the professor has created for himself and his daughter.
Like the rampaging monster terrorizing the planet Altair, Occupy Wall Street is the physical manifestation of the monstrous, collective id of this nation’s liberal elites.
Sigmund Freud coined the term “id” to describe the lowest realm of functioning in the human psyche. It represents the most base, instinctual portion of the human mind. He defined the id as “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality … and most of that is of a negative character[.] … We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations” (Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933).
Occupy Wall Street has never been about what the occupying young people have had to say. It has been about creating a window of opportunity for left-leaning commentators and political activists to seize control of the national conversation leading up to the November 2012 elections. It is meant to be the launching point for a revolution. And if the revolution has to turn violent, so be it.
Adbusters, home of the masterminds behind Occupy Wall Street, describes its organization’s mission as “a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new socialist activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century.”
This toppling, it seems, entails a lot of extreme, foul behavior. So far, Occupy encampments and events around the country have set the scene for more than 4,000 arrests, multiple alleged rapes, anti-Semitic harangues, attacks on police, child endangerment, public defecation and urination, public sex and masturbation, drug use, thefts, assaults, vandalism, the destruction of private and public property, devastating blows to local merchants’ businesses, a few deaths, and much, much more. The list continues to grow.
By any measurement of objective truth, this “movement” is appalling. What is more appalling is this: adult progressives — politicos, pundits, self-interested activists, and activist organizations — are inhumanely manipulating these poor clueless kids who are experiencing degradation all for the sake of a flawed, failing ideology.
This is my essay topic. At roughly 40 TRILLION miles from earth, you can classify this as science fiction. We could never reach it in a million lifetimes.