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The Gray Lady chides protesters, champagne flue in hand

History is a bitch. No sooner might one have thought the Times had recovered from the open and flagrant embarrassment of lies it spouted about Iraq WMD, thanks to Judith Miller, than we hear its nasal whine about the hoi polloi occupying parks in the Wall Street area in a confused attempt at cultural revolution.

The Times’ latest snooty salvo at the unwashed and undereducated youth, entitled “Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim” (9/25), accuses demonstrators of a lack of intellectual clarity about what they are demonstrating about. To translate: You’ve got it pretty good here, kid, drop the signs and the guitars, get a haircut and get a job. You’re beginning to annoy.

The last time the NYT took such a condescending approach to a cultural uprising was in 1968, when the riot in Chicago and the growing antiwar demonstrations across the country left it equally mildly bemused. Their thinking then, as now, was that these confused children should just grow up and go away.

What they fail to see is that this is the beginning of a far more meaningful revolution, one that threatens to be chillier and much longer lasting than the skirmishes of 1968. With the Vietnam War, the “children” were protesting an unnecessary—not to say unethical–murderous rampage by the U.S abroad, and their reaction was simple moral outrage at the blood on all our hands.

The current demonstration comes as a first tip toward a far more complex and disturbing iceberg. We are heading on a disastrous course financially in this country, and it is having a global impact. It should be enough to scare anyone silly, but the NYT apparently only gets the silly part. The exercise on Wall Street, project Occupy Wall Street, may seem silly to the Times as it does to execs trying to pick their routes carefully as they walk between silly protesters with silly signs on their morning walks to their boardrooms, but the protestors’ warning is quite educated and quite precise.

Wall Street is the now-acknowledged CEO of the United States of America, and their control of policy at home and abroad is absolute. When the tipping point of poverty in America reaches the unbearable threshold and the real revolution begins (probably during the final phase in the devaluation of the dollar), this demonstration will come to signify the first shot fired at the bulwark of the power elite and against corporate excess. The coming protest will not be about moral issues; nor will it be about class. It will be an epic struggle for mere survival, and it will be violent.

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