There was a time in my life when I had an avid interest in Surrealism, Dada, and general artistic culture of Europe from about 1880 to 1930 or so. One of the figures in this scene was the author Alfred Jarry. Jarry was a Frenchman who was somewhere between eccentric and insane, and who created a character, Ubu Roi, who was so grotesque and strange that it seemingly left a permanent mark on the Parisian literary scene.
As described in Wikipedia
“The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world,” wrote Jane Taylor. “Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification.” Jarry’s metaphor for the modern man, he is an antihero — fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, cruel, cowardly and evil.”
I think we might rightly think that the protestors in New York and other places view “Corporate America” as possessing all those traits.
Here is a picture, by George Grosz–who could very plausibly be viewed as an intellectual heir to the Ubu tradition (I saw Pro-Ubu graffiti when I was in Oxford)–which I think shows the rough images these people have in mind:
And yet, the quoted commentator goes on to say something interesting:
There is,” wrote Taylor, “a particular kind of pleasure for an audience watching these infantile attacks. Part of the satisfaction arises from the fact that in the burlesque mode which Jarry invents, there is no place for consequence. While Ubu may be relentless in his political aspirations, and brutal in his personal relations, he apparently has no measurable effect upon those who inhabit the farcical world which he creates around himself. He thus acts out our most childish rages and desires, in which we seek to gratify ourselves at all cost.”[5] The derived adjective “ubuesque” is recurrent in French and francophone political debate.
These protests are Ubuesque. They amount to the big idea that sitting around in public places annoying people is going to create jobs, create purpose, end war, alter our financial system, enable them to more easily get someone else to pay for the excellent healthcare they receive, and generally make it so life serves them warm milk and cookies and night and tucks them in with a goodnight kiss.
There is anger here, clearly. These people hate wealth, at the very time they are camping out to get more of it. They hate people who create wealth, but their plan, again, to get some is not to invent something, not to start a business, not to work hard at their job and get promoted, and not to work to support policies that encourage job creation. No: their plan is to WHINE and be really ANNOYING so that the world will come calling on them.
What I think needs to be seen here is that this does not represent strength, but weakness. They are doing this precisely BECAUSE they know they and theirs are losing the support of the American people. They had the dream candidate, who privately told them he believed everything they did, and shared their goals. But political necessity has forced him into a boatload of compromise, and ramming the big stuff through the way he did set off a powderkeg.
We need to be clear: these protests are INTENDED to amount to extortion, even though the plan is to use every useful idiot who floats in. They are undertaken with NO PLAN and no consideration of consequence. In this, too, they are ubuesque.
They are trying to destroy companies that employ thousands of people who will then be unemployed if they are successful. They are blocking the way to work for those people who do have jobs, and many of whom now have to add them to their list of daily stresses.
These protests help no one, EXCEPT the impotent ideologues who want to push policies in their direction without going through the futile effort of defending idiotic and counterproductive policies. And they will, in all likelihood, actually cause increasingly strong backlash against adults acting like pouting children in public, DEMANDING things, but not offering in the slightest to contribute.
But that, too, is not the point. What is the point? A FEELING. They are no doubt getting that. For my part, I think these protests are going to help the conservative cause immensely. When things are chaotic, you do not go to people like Barack Obama. You vote for the guy who is seemingly pictured every time in front of a gun rack.
Editorial comment: this does not quite get to what I wanted to say. I am tired, and have work to do. I’ll add a bit more, but this still isn’t quite it:
The emotional context I wanted to convey is one of functional nihilism. These people believe nothing, and so theater becomes their sustaining ritual. When you have no soul, you must become an actor, lest you be discovered. The nice thing about leftism is that it is always over the horizon, and if it is implemented, all the failures are concealed. It is in actuality a doctrine of horror, but while on the stage the pretending can continue forever, if one is so inclined. That is why we still have Communists.